tswartz

Hi HN,

I started this newsletter almost two years ago a side project. I’m fascinated by how products evolve to meet the needs of their customers. So much of startup and tech culture is focused on celebrating launch day. We often forget about all of the hard work that goes into iterating the product after launch to find the proverbial product market fit and sustainable growth. The year following a launch is usually quite challenging, and most products don’t go gangbusters with exponential growth. Instead there are countless tweaks, features developed then abandoned, marketing techniques tested, and long nights spent stressed about the future.

This newsletter is dedicated to that first year.

I've done 31 interviews and have some good ones lined up for the start of 2023. Hope you find them useful. You can read the full archive here: https://www.readoneyearwiser.com/posts

I started this newsletter in March of last year. So far, I've done about 20 interviews. You can find all of them here: https://www.readoneyearwiser.com/posts

I decided to start the newsletter because so much of startup and tech culture is focused on celebrating launch day, but the hard part comes after launch!

Let me know what you think.

Hey All - I've started to interview founders and product makers one year after their product launch to hear about their journey and what they've learned along the way. A lot of tech focuses on product launches and I think the hard part comes after launching when you are struggling to find product market fit and grow.

For my newsletter, I recently spoke to Phil Libin about his video startup, mmhmm. Let me know what you think.

I recently interviewed the co-founder and CEO of Fairstream, a virtual events platform that helps companies recruit and hire candidates from diverse communities.

Some good insights on being a founder, but I especially liked when he walked me through how they realized that the first iteration of the product wasn’t the best one and how after their virtual career fair concept went viral they only had 3 weeks to put the event together.

I really like the layout and think this would be super helpful. Obviously it will provide more value once the community grows and their are more upvotes. So far all the categories I looked at all had 0 votes.

One thing you may want to try out in the early days to make it look like there is more activity is to create a bunch of different logins for yourself and friends. Reddit had a super admin tool that allowed them to select from a "user" dropdown anytime the founders wanted to post a comment. That way it appeared there was a lot more dialog and activity.

Looks like a great product! I like that you are making group travel easier and helping people hash out the details and vote.

One bit of feedback. I found it very challenging to scroll down you landing page (Chrome on Macbook). The page doesn't scroll at first and then quickly jumps to the next section, but then it kept going and was really sensitive. Then it was challenging to scroll back up to the next section.

I built an app a few years ago that does this for bars. Bar Roulette. It's free in the app store...give it a try. I've had a lot of fun using. http://barroulette.cool/

As someone trying to build my own apps, I really enjoyed your write-up on how you grew Habit Streaks.

A brief, but interesting post on how viral products are simple and can be easily described in one sentence.

>The format of both descriptions is the same: “You do X and Y happens.” X is the input and Y is the output. This input-output pair matches our intuition about how software works. Simplifying the product as a straightforward input and desirable output creates the sense that it’s an ingenious idea.

I think it's important to have a simple product and using a feature to explain it makes sense. However, this brought to mind the sales and marketing idea that it's better to sell benefits, not features. I'm not sure where I sit on which approach is better, I suppose they each have their purpose. I definitely find myself pitching my side projects based on the feature, not the benefit :)

What did you find interesting about it? How does it compare to Optimizely?

Good point. It's often stipulated in the contract or made clear during the interview process what the expectations are, which is good. The unfortunate part is that employers may not realize that their policies are actually decreasing productivity.

I agree that forcing the same strict work hours (9am - 7pm) is not always effective. The author explains exactly why that doesn't work for them and why they are much less effective.

However, I've found that when people all have different hours (especially over different timezones) it's difficult for the one-off meetings when something needs to be hashed out in person or skype. I suppose this problem may actually be a side effect of our office having strict working hours so we don't know how to operate on the days when most of the office is remote and working on different hours. Companies like 37Signals have clearly figured out how to build a collaborative and productive company across multiple timezones.

A long, but interesting article about a deaf tennis player excelling in a sport that puts a value on hearing. I can certainly understand how hearing is an important part, as described by Andy Roddick in the article, "that his first reaction to an opponent’s shots comes from his hearing, as does his initial information about the shot coming toward him." But I agree with the author that this may be a case of the majority of players and coaches being able to hear and thus the sport puts more value on that then being able to predict (based on visual cues) where your opponent is going to hit the ball.

Kudos to Lee Duck-hee changing the sport.

>>People who were born deaf or hard of hearing may have a stronger sense of intuition in general, and tend to see subtle clues in a person’s face or body language better than people with normal hearing,” Stringer said. “They are more visual, because when one sense is compromised, other senses are heightened to compensate. If my hypothesis is correct, people who are deaf or hard of hearing may have an advantage in tennis because they can pick up visual cues faster and better as to their opponent’s plans, and may have better reflexes because they see things sooner.