Comment by acidbaseextract | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acidbaseextract | Hacker News Reader

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acidbaseextract

I had my first startup fail in the late 2000s because we built a sales prediction software that sounded cool, but nobody actually wanted. We even had a large paid pilot with a major auto manufacturer, but they didn't renew when it turned out that none of their employees had actually used the software.

Making something nobody wants is a classic startup mistake. I resolved not to make it again and read a great deal about market validation and building products.

I have one recommendation for those reading this thread: Steve Blank's "Four Steps to the Epiphany". It contrasts Product Development (focusing on a product with no customers) vs Customer Development (focusing on customer problems and building software around those). Honestly you don't even need the whole book, there's a PDF with the first couple chapters floating around [1]. I had a bunch of "holy shit, that's exactly what I did wrong" moments while reading it.

Eric Ries' "Lean Startup" is also an excellent book on this topic.

[1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upl...

Someone on HN once said “It’s hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don’t have”. Building software that solves a problem that the intended users don’t understand that they have is also a real problem.

Yeah, creating problems in people for which you conveniently sell solutions is the job of marketing.

As for building a solution to "a problem that the intended users don’t understand that they have", I'll agree that this may not be a good thing for a startup to do - but when I see how basic research is being defunded and drowned in red tape, and people saying that startups are the new, distributed R&D departments, I feel the middle has fallen out. When startups do a greedy gradient descent, and academia struggles doing science, who's going to work on solving problems that require solutions one or two steps beyond what the intended audience can understand? FLOSS community? What about outside software?

I should clarify that I see nothing wrong in solving a problem people don’t realize they have, and to be fair, this is what startups often do. However, many/most developers see marketing and sales as something unnecessary, eg. “How hard can it be”. And they realize that it’s pretty damn hard when it’s already too late.

April Dunford's "Obviously Awesome" is new(ish) and very good on this topic.

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