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Comment by Palomides | Hacker News Reader

> timing

> products that seem stupid or annoying at first. In addition, there should be a small group of early adopters who really care about the product

saved you a click

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You are offering a great product. I hope you can scale.

I would love a summary of every post but unfortunately we don't allow bots or novelty accounts on here.

Luckily, we have reddit for that.

The app Hews has a feature that shows the post with the text "tl;dr" in it underneath the link. It's quite useful in my experience.

You'd like it in the short term but probably not the long term. It's useful to remember HN isn't just a list of links. It's a conversation. If you set up your list of links to attract a certain audience, those people will eventually dominate the conversation.

From a strategic standpoint, the way to win is to appeal to a bookish audience. It's why HN is better than any subreddit.

(Besides /r/HighQualityGifs.)

http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ (not me)

I'll have to say. It's annoying at first.

Yes, that wasn't a very good article. "Timing." well duh. Might as well have said, "success," or "luck," or "having rich parents." Then the rest of it was a puff piece on how awesome the guy being interviewed was.

I'm going to assume no one really knows, and everyone just pretends to know.

To be fair, its different for every product. If you aren't a social network, I don't see how you could go viral. Search ads wont work if nobody searches for your product, ie if it is something completely new. You can't get users to refer friends if you have no incentive to give.

This is why I pay closer attention to advice that is descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Tell me what your situation is, and what you did that worked, and let me extrapolate. Bonus points for what didn't work.

> To be fair, its different for every product.

Doesn't that mean the entire idea is not generalizable?

I think timing is something you can actually reason about though?

"Lots of people have tried a similar thing before, what's different this time?"

Maybe it's that now there's millions more mobile users. Maybe there's a new regulation that got removed/got put in place. Maybe any of a hundred other things. But timing goes to an actual underlying reason.

I'm kind of pushing this point as it's something I've screwed up a number of times. I'd write off some startup as doomed while really the problem was that I wasn't considering everything.

Sure, I mean Star Wars was/is such a cultural phenomenon because of timing, but it was so much more than that. It was a great story, it blended old style movies with new style movies, it had great music, great special effects, etc. 10 years earlier and it's Buck Rogers, 10 years later and it's Flash Gordon. Lucas went over budget and had to deal with the executives who wanted to bail and pulled it off.

The article just wasn't very insightful, and it was on the top of the list. It's obvious this was a clickbait article to puff the guy they were interviewing. I suspect he is looking for clients and is using HN to get eyeballs and got some people to up vote it. That's more insightful than the article.

I dunno, maybe I'm just grumpy today.

Having started a business without worrying enough about timing, I'd say it's a pretty good article. It's easy to (arrogantly) assume the world will make way for your excellence, regardless of your timing, but it ain't always so.

> small group of early adopters who really care

Reminds me of Kevin Kelly idea of 1,000 true fans.

http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

> In addition, there should be a small group of early adopters who really care about the product

For writers and bloggers, this is often explained as "100 true fans" -- not sure if that particular term is popular in the startup sphere.

Kevin kelly's 1000 true fans

It's really just another way to say "Product Market fit" (rather than just Product), which was already identified by pmarca as what he thinks is the the dominant factor for startup success.

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