Going Beyond “Make Something People Want”

To go up a level in metaness, does this kind of thinking actually help?<p>From my naïve perspective, it looks like a bunch of marketing concepts that may nudge someone in the right direction, but who knows? All this analysis might be useless and even harmful.<p>Nietzsche said, in his funny and somewhat misogynistic way: &quot;Supposing truth is a woman, what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman&#x27;s heart?&quot;<p>Look at this paragraph, now look at Peter Thiel&#x27;s PowerPoint presentation. What if the very feverish desire to create a &quot;successful startup&quot; makes you fail?<p>Maybe the idea of the startup itself is the best startup. Look at all these people making money selling people ideas and tips on how to be a startup guy. I made a billion dollars, and so can you!<p>The article mentions the components of desire. Look at them again, now look at the feverish startup culture of Hacker news.<p>Everybody wants a recipe for success. Maybe the only successful recipe is selling recipes.<p>Facebook didn&#x27;t start as a startup, neither did Google, neither did Craigslist.<p>&quot;Having observed people helping one another in friendly, social, and trusting communal ways on the Internet via the WELL, MindVox and Usenet, and feeling isolated as a relative newcomer to San Francisco, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark decided to create something similar for local events.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s not a guy who&#x27;s trying to create a startup and make a million bucks. It&#x27;s a guy who&#x27;s feeling a need <i>himself</i>, who trusts other people and wants to connect with them. It&#x27;s a guy who&#x27;s grounded in reality even if he feels isolated.<p>Here&#x27;s some other ideas for slogans. Make something <i>you</i> want. Make something your friends want. Make something your local community wants. Make something your mom wants. Make something real. Spend more time thinking empathically about human beings than making &quot;hand-crafted designs&quot; and A&#x2F;B testing your landing pages. Be a person. Don&#x27;t make a &quot;product.&quot;

The author describes an interesting framework. The problem I find in praxis is, that founders <i>know</i> about principles Paul Graham or Peter Thiel talk about, but they have not internalized them and still fail to <i>act</i> according to them. The more complex the framework gets, the more opportunity is given to misjudge and fail to act on them.<p>Founders try to <i>make something people</i> want, they just misjudge what people want. They know, that they should <i>fail fast</i> but end up playing business anyway, because they are scared of talking to people and to actually fail.<p>I therefore think, that complex frameworks are interesting to look at but short catchphrases are more useful in praxis, because they are already hard enough to act by.

Interesting article. Nice analysis and formalization of two thought frameworks (Thiel and Graham). Good ideas and good research with the mix of anthropology and psychological included.<p>Framing this whole article as a hypothesis, the question is now whether this hypothesis can be proven (ie does it work in real life) and what are the limitations of this theoretical approach (ie maybe it will work only for software and IT opportunities).<p>Anyway it seems like an interesting avenue to explore (combining psychological and anthropological studies with investment research). Does anybody know of any VC&#x2F;accelerators&#x2F;incubators that apply this method?

Very interesting read. What I would add to this framework is the often overlooked &quot;solving one big problem&quot; vs &quot;solving lots of small problems&quot;. Most startups try to solve lots of problems, which can be seen by the number of features being developped. This is understandable: in the early days, you keep thinking that &quot;if we had feature X, we would close customer A&quot; and keep on adding more and more features.<p>In general this doesn&#x27;t work, because small problems are something we can live with. It&#x27;s way better to solve one big problem, the one the customer is losing sleep over.<p>At Local Motion, we noticed that the big customers we closed fast were always companies with one very big problem we could solve (e.g. &quot;my cars are getting stolen&quot;) vs lots of small problems (e.g. &quot;software tool for maintenance&quot; + &quot;data reports&quot; + &quot;graphs&quot; + xxx)

I have a simpler heuristic to get to success I think is to build something that YOU wand and YOU would pay for. Then charge what you would be willing to pay.<p>Unless you have a boatload of empathy or you spend a lot of time living with and solving other people&#x27;s problems, you are going to waste a lot of time on these kind of silly frameworks for trying to find the perfect idea.<p>Yet, you are one of many billion people on the planet who buy things. So, it is highly unlikely that what you want is totally unique. Also, the only person you can truly empathize with is yourself. You know what you want and you like better than anyone else.<p>Build for yourself. Sell what you would buy. If you wouldn&#x27;t pay what you are trying to charge, then you are probably in the wrong business.

This article may well be interesting, but I would need some kind of Google Translate in order to be able to read it.

16 months old? How did the testing and overlay with PG&#x27;s 18 startup mistakes go?