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A comment on Ask HN: How to effectively get feedback from users?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: How to effectively get feedback from users? by diggan on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @10:03AM (#24980215)
Crazy idea: if you're just starting out and "nobody actually needs your product" is a problem, build something else or pivot radically. You should not have to bribe users with gift cards in order to use your product. If you're going that far, you're far off the goal of having something useful.
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Re:Ask HN: How to effectively get feedback from users? by badestrand on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @10:35AM (#24980551)
In theory of course this should be the case, but in practice this is terrible advice IMO. There are tons of great successful businesses that wouldn't have passed this test.

Did anyone really need the early AirTable? No, you could just use Google Sheets. Did anyone really need WhatsApp? No, there was texting already. And so on.

In theory everyone should stay far away from building "nice to have" products and only solve hard business problems but that is a super high standard that even most companies that are already out there probably don't meet.

Of course, getting feedback and adjusting your vision is super important though and sometimes a radical pivot is needed.

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Re:Ask HN: How to effectively get feedback from users? by diggan on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @11:30AM (#24981111)
Agree to disagree then I guess.

Yes, AirTable added additional benefits compared to Google Sheets. So did WhatsApp. That's why they succeeded in the first place, their first (public) iteration was useful enough to gain initial traction.

I'm not arguing that everything is useless unless they solve "hard business problems" (which I'm not even sure what that refers to), but if your thing doesn't solve anything at all, it's either entertainment or the wrong thing to build.

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Re:Ask HN: How to effectively get feedback from users? by edmundsauto on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @10:24AM (#24980438)
Eh, it’s not necessarily clear that nobody needs what you’ll end up with after iteration. Or maybe people need what you sell, but your marketing is unclear.
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