Startup School 2019 - A Few Notes
Recently I watched the first week talks of Startup School 2019 from Y Combinator. It's not just interesting if you are a founder but also useful if you are working in a company to understand how to build better products.
So here a few points from the talks:-
Even if you have a product idea in mind. Reach out for people maybe at bigger companies to discuss problems they have in similar products before you implement your idea. What are the features they like? What are the pain points? If you can improve or fix any of these points, try to sell your solution.
You don't have to build a solution first to be able to sell it. you can sell an idea by a simple landing page.
At the early stages of a company, Talking directly to users is so much cheaper and more effective than ads. Products can get so much worse when you don't communicate with actual user for max 6 weeks.
Build features based on user feedback and get back to them when you implement it. It's a good way to transfer them into customers and will make them so happy.
Usually, users don't know what they want in your product. it's your job to figure it out and they will know it when they see it.
Doing users interviews "before" building a solution is the best way to save you from "I built the best product" bias, without actually solving a user's problem. This mistake I personally saw many times that companies try to pick a technology and then ask what kind of problems we can solve with it? You have to start from a user need and solve his problem with appropriate technology. Simply like in real life you want to fix something then you pick the right tool to fix it.