Successful businesses I have worked at have started out solving a real problem for someone (in a business) - with that person telling us that they know other businesses have the same problem.
If someone in an industry comes to you with a problem - and they have worked in the industry sufficiently long enough to have been in multiple companies - they can give you a pretty good idea of what size the prize might be.
The difficulty a lot of us have working in software is that we don’t really get enough exposure to these people.
Simple and superb root cause analysis!
It takes the looooong web 2.0 funnels and flips it to a single step:
Your customers pay to interact with your app at all and there is insatiable demand at the beginning, unless you do some boomer-level system design that is based on pretending that a 3 trillion dollar crypto native audience doesnt exist already and you need to onboard a bunch of technophobes.
In comparison, the entire web 2.0 ethos basically sums up to getting a customer to put their credit card into your website for a small charge, as a funnel for a bigger recurring charge later
in web3 all of your users are at the last step at the very beginning. they are even paying for all your hosting costs. they are paying to update your database! and your actual business model of being some form of plumbing with a transaction fee, if you didnt just sell a token collection, is fine and has low overhead costs
this will continue attracting developers and their entire audience in perpetuity because the entire web 2.0 ecosystem cannot compete with that
Thank you for the insights.
the only people that have an issue with web3 have a characteristic and typically describe an irrelevant system design that doesn’t factor in the simple reality that users are paying in web3 and wouldn’t in web2.0, the only people having an issue creating web3 apps have a characteristic, for example I just got off a call with someone trying to jump on the web3 bandwagon for hotel reservations - a technophobic audience that should be ignored for web3 ux fictions - and the only people funding broken web2 apps that are supposed to use web3 rails have a characteristic
reclaim the term like every marginalized group does
How much did you make?
> reclaim the term like every marginalized group does
I'm 34.
aiming to do more of both this cycle
I'm assuming this is USD?
It's curious, because some of your other posts[0] would suggest someone who is a little more price sensitive than someone who has made more than 10 million dollars from their own website. But I'm probably reading this incorrectly or something.
also out of curiosity, in your world why does me saying a third party charge other people money, over two years ago or at any point in time, suggest what you said it would suggest. it would be a matter if other people are price sensitive, for reference
if one were looking for something to invalidate or grasping for an ad hominem, doesnt it require interpreting the posting accurately as well at a bare minimum?
In my experience, people who are less price sensitive tend to not think about inconsequential sums. So it was surprising to me to read that someone who has made over $10,000,000 would care about whether or not Calendly would charge for no-shows.
Just curious about the thought process. That's all.
the answer is that calendly does not charge for no-shows and my time is valuable, which would match the worldview you’re looking for, and on the defensive perception, I’m not sure if you really understand the interaction proposed.
but if we were on the same page all along, then we also have a different definition of defensive since clarifying whether you are perceiving the same concept is not defensive to wonder about.
Like, isn’t there another comment somewhere else in my post history that would be better to question what you think an 8-figure HN user would be doing with their time? since you don’t know the value of the intended conversations on the calendly schedule, that requesting they charge wouldn’t be factor in supporting your validity or not of price sensitivity or inconsequential sums, and the other party would be charged either way, not me. I would define this whole thought process as a non-sequitur.
in any case, if you would like to talk more about web3 user acquisition funnels and how it compresses web2.0 ones, removing a magic based marketing industry and replacing them with paying customers, I'm available for that.
no response has acknowledged the substance of what has been said in this entire subthread, only that I replied at all
if you would like to talk more about web3 user acquisition funnels and how it compresses web2.0 ones, I’m available for that
plenty of cool shit for those who do things onchain tho
philisters on HN are not our clientele. they’ll never get it and it doesnt matter anymore. but if you are a developer or “BUIDL” er there are unique system designs that are superior than anything web2.0 infrastructure has to offer.
I always recommend the book The Mom Test to would-be entrepreneurs. It goes into more detail on why asking people if they will buy something is worthless (as you mentioned), and how you can ask much better questions to find and validate problems worth solving.
I'd say in addition to entrepreneurs, it's an important book for product teams / product engineers to understand what the Mom Test teaches, and tune the filter on asking the right questions to get the highest signal, and ensure the solution closely matches the value prop for the customer. Then sales and marketing get a whole lot easier when you've asked the right questions and solved the right problems.
Just set correct expectations that your MVP won’t be something for the customers.
Or maybe it will. But I think biggest issue is having high hopes after completing v0.1.
When you start out, you probably only have a vague idea of what the product will be.
The sort of people you want to talk to might not want to talk to you. They are busy people and you don't even have a product!
People saying they will give you money is worthless, in my experience. Only people actually giving you money counts for anything.
Estimating the market size is hard and not all that relevant. See also: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fall...