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Comment by TACIXAT | Hacker News Reader

The stuff listed as conventional advice, I've never seen anywhere. Mixpanel, the biggest player in the space says just focus on a few key metrics.

>You should track “dozens of metrics” without fail.

>You should A/B test every variable.

The unconvential advice is exactly what you see on YC. Talk to customers.

>All of the not-so-sexy tasks I was focusing on — actually engaging customers, implementing feedback and building a library of educational content — were building momentum.

Legit thought I was gonna read something about how they never talked to customers, attended conferences and founder meet ups, made a shit product and struck it big.

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Surely “have daily stand ups”, “have sprints” etc. are actually conventional.

Stand-ups in general just seem to be a way to brag and sprints are meaningless after a while.

I think your company is doing standups and sprints wrong.

Most probably are

Sprints and stand-up have that in common with communism, on the paper it sounds good but in practice it ends up very differently.

I don't think 'A/B testing every variable' is conventional advice in any sense.

A/B test where that degree of tuning would make sense, given the initiative.

If you are a massive blog, and 'word choice' will make or break your company, you might want to A/B links.

But for SaaS marketing? Maybe just write decent copy. There's rarely a large enough audience anyhow.

Summary of Article:

"A good product is usually better than good marketing"

I mean, you're right that those particular examples don't fit the conventional advice, but they are common traps people fall into.

You also didn't mention the other examples from the article which definitely do come up in conventional advice: things like tracking churn, ARPU & LTV, and making it easy for customers to try the product.

> Legit thought I was gonna read something about how they never talked to customers, attended conferences and founder meet ups

I can't tell, are you saying that attending conferences and founders meetups are conventional advice, or that the conventional advice is that they shouldn't be attended?

The conventional (or what I consider conventional as I see all the YC propaganda) advice is you shouldn't "play founder". There are hundreds of events that can jerk you off and make you feel like a star.

That said, conferences can be productive. There was a good talk during Startup School this year about going to a conference with a 100% booked meeting lineup and walked away with a bunch of deals. As well, peer groups can be very beneficial (that is very much what Startup School is). They might have been poor choices as proxies for "playing founder".

Most of the time they're useless because people don't have a plan. Who are you trying to meet? Customers? Investors? People to hire? Do you know the attendees or speakers? Can you save time with focused meetings? Also what's the cost in time and money compared to productivity lost elsewhere?

I've seen people spend thousands to go to conferences and just end up hanging out with their competitors. Fun maybe, but useless.

Here ya go, https://www.amazon.com/Hatching-Twitter-Story-Friendship-Bet...

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