The most important thing to understand about new products and startups

It's interesting to me that Paul lists humility as an (the?) important factor leading to successful product design. It seems like there would be a natural tension between the courage it takes to found a startup and the humility it takes to be successful.<p>I also wonder if honesty might be another word for the skill in question - i.e., being honest with yourself about what works, what doesn't, and what's truly necessary.

I can see what he's saying: to make a great product, basically consider market forces your local gradient, then follow the steepest descent. Surely, though, that suffers from the same problem as the classic version of the gradient descent algorithm: it's easy to get stuck in a local optimum. So I do think your starting point matters.<p>His example, gmail, suffers from this too. There were many webmail and offline email clients before gmail, the key to its success was its integration with an excellent search algorithm. Without that starting point, it would have most likely been pulled towards some local optimum which had already been discovered. Okay, so Google is full of search experts, so maybe internal market forces would have been different than those of the worldwide market. Most startups don't have that kind of micro-market which takes them to some kind of new optimium though.<p>Taking the algorithmic analogy further, in practice you would probably not want to do pure gradient descent if it feels like you're heading for a known local optimum, and instead stochastically/heuristically "go against the flow" and experiment with idiosyncratic features.

This doesn't work for web startups, but for people selling real products I think the best thing to do is apply the baggie test. That is, when Richard Garriott made his first computer game he put the diskettes in clear plastic baggies and gave them to the local computer store to sell. Similarly, O'Reilly started his publishing empire by selling stapled xerox copies of a unix FAQ he wrote at a trade show.<p>The idea being that if people would buy your product if they saw it in a baggie, you probably have a good product/market.

"if people don't want it, then you will fail"<p>Maybe the best advice you'll ever get here.<p>So find a customer early. Very early.

Quote: "MySpace is a great example of this. I'm pretty sure that their custom profile page layouts were an accident. They didn't know enough to properly escape the text that people put on their profiles, and that allowed their users to start including arbitrary html and css in their pages."<p>Accidental is a good theory. It's always nice to poke fun at MySpace. <a href="http://www.zentu.net/open-space/myspace.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.zentu.net/open-space/myspace.png</a><p>I sometimes wonder how it's possible for something like this to happen on such a wide or popular scale -- does Microsoft seriously control or influence that much of the W3 standards for compliance?<p>(edit -- sorry. I've obviously been writing far too much HTML lately.)

I respect the time PB has taken to write this post, but think this advice is aimed at beginners. In my opinion, the most important thing about new startups is to do it in an area with others your age trying to accomplish similar feats, many of whom are slowly succeeding, and where tech savvy investors and employees are. Smart people who can accurately assess your abilities as well as help each other with honest feedback.<p>I've seen many variations of the same insightful opinions like that one, but something very important that actually requires more than just product or language choice is getting up off your ass and moving to Silicon Valley. For that reason, that should be the most covered topic--at least in my experience.

Eric Schmidt walk around Google and says:"Dont fight the internet, man" :)

"And, the market doesn't care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product."<p>Indeed. Nor to they care what technology you use (assuming it isn't thrown in their face).

The most important thing is creating things that people want, with a way to make money.