Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

Re:Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing by soneca on Thursday October 02, 2014 @09:52PM (#8404101)

I feel that this lecture generated less comments (maybe less upvotes too) than the previous lectures. I would guess that this is because we might think we are "so over all of this". I mean, we all think we already know this "get out of the building" and "talk to your customers". We think "c'mon, this is so basic, we are more sophisticated than that". And I think this is a mistake.

Underestimating this initial process, taking it for granted, we create the perfect environment to trick ourselves in not doing it. We might tell ourselves that our product is a SaaS for a very specific crown that we can only find online, and there is no street fair or postal office where we can find them. We might tell ourselves that a $100 Facebook Ads campaign is good for testing our assumptions. Or that is not necessary to get really immersed on our industry, because we already know what is wrong and how to solve.

These are all little lies that convince ourselves that our particular context is different. Sure it is. Sure you might not find your customers on the streets, but that is no excuse to not talk online to your customers, be constant presence on a forum, and arrange meetings with those who happens to be on your city.

Most of advice for startups out there are for those who already have some traction, a few employees. So people might skip the skills and attitude necessary to go from 0 to 100 users or customers. This is the perfect lecture for this crowd.

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Re:Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing by jlees on Friday October 03, 2014 @04:03AM (#8404679)

It is far too easy to say "I know I know something" and mistake that for being able to do it when the time is right. This piece is the rocky piece, the point where it's easy to be carried away with enthusiasm for something you haven't built yet, add features on to a prototype no users have ever used, or simply not hear the truths we want to hear because they bruise our egos, our decisions, and our pride.

If you can't get in touch with your customers to get feedback at the earliest stage, how are you going to get them to use your product? And if you don't want to talk to customers because you're ashamed of the prototype or you want to show them something 'perfect', you'll never talk to them at all.

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Re:Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing by clairity on Friday October 03, 2014 @12:16AM (#8404290)

this lecture definitely has the most practical advice so far (not that the others weren't good as well).

adora also spoke at the female founders conference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eP3-ra8nZY) and her story about her and her brother's persistence in systematically climbing the learning curve of product/market fit was one of the most memorable. you can tell that she was speaking from real, hard-earned experience for each of the lessons she related in this lecture.

and i love that she threw in a basketball reference, even though you don't usually just throw the ball around. =)

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Re:Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing by rajensanghvi on Friday October 03, 2014 @08:17AM (#8405149)

agree on the basketball reference, the analogy definitely made it easy to understand

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Re:Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing by jkaunisv1 on Friday October 03, 2014 @02:41PM (#8406938)

I think it generated less comments because a lot of the content has been seen before, frequently. It needs to be in that course, but the HN audience has probably read a lot of that advice already.

I'm expecting much of this course to repeat things we already know from reading PG's essays and other blogs, condensed and clarified. That's not a bad thing, as you said it's good to keep it in our heads. And I think there will be new nuggets of wisdom embedded in the stuff we "already know".

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Re:Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing by diminish on Friday October 03, 2014 @08:16AM (#8405145)

This lecture is a bit more dense in practical content, so some people like me, need more time to watch fully again and digest before echoing in a chamber :)

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Re:Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing by hellodevnull on Friday October 03, 2014 @09:29AM (#8405414)

What I liked about her lecture is that unlike the previous ones that were full of general ideas about starting a startup, she related her practical advice to her own experiences and the mistakes she made. Examples are very useful and for me they ingrain the underlying ideas to a greater extent. Also learning about what not to do is just as, if not more important (see PG's lecture of counterintuitive parts of startups) than learning about what to do.

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