Build it and they will come is a perfectly great strategy if you can build it quickly and start showing it to customers.
Completely ignoring customers while you "build it and build it and build it and polish it and polish it some more and get to 100% test coverage and make sure the UX is good enough for for your dog to use and then polish some more" is the trap.
In other words: ship it when it barely works and don't improve it until a customer tells you to improve it.
This is exactly where I am right now. I’ve been heads-down for 6 months on a no-code portfolio builder. It’s 95% done and ready to go live, but I’m struggling with the shift to marketing. It’s easy to solve logic problems in code; it’s much harder to solve the problem of 'how do I get people to actually see this?' Dealing with that 'build it and they will come' instinct is a daily battle.
I'm attempting to solve this cold start problem by pooling money with other operators to buy an existing business. We're currently closing on our first acquisition and plan to do more if the experiment goes well[0].
Please feel free to reach out (contact in profile) if you're curious about the approach, I'm happy to answer any questions.
I went with Reolink, but not the WiFi ones. The completely offline version has no privacy concerns, no cloud sync, no subscription. It just records to an SD card. They're great!
Not a co-op, but similar: I'm working on an owner-operated SaaS incubator[0]. A few of us are pooling our own money to buy, operate, and grow a small SaaS company together. We're currently in the diligence phase.
It's an experiment and could fail spectacularly. But if it's successful then we'll finally own our own success and build wealth for ourselves, not VC or PE funds.
I haven't tried any of these products, but I do have a senior dog with very severe separation anxiety. She barks and destroys stuff the minute I step out the door until the minute I come back. I could keep her from destroying stuff with a crate, but the neighbors would still throw a fit about the barking.
Effectively, this means that I have to hire a dog sitter every time I leave the house without her, just like an infant. If dog tv could fix this problem for me it would create an enormous amount of economic value.
I've noticed this too. "...two small tweaks" is just a variation on the "one weird trick" you see in chumboxes[0]. I guess this sort of enshittification was inevitable.
I’m a native English speaker and I think this is an easier jump if you know other Romance languages. In Spanish and Portuguese “woman” and “wife” are often the same word, “mujer” and “mulher” respectively.
Over the years I've noticed something unusual about myself: I don't even see these icons. My brain goes directly to the text. This applies to all visual material, but is most evident in printed advertising.
Apparently other people notice the hot girl and the puppy and the fried chicken sandwich first. Meanwhile, I've already read all the fine print.
I used to notice and somewhat - but not solely - rely on icons, especially nice designed sets.
It seems though that a combination of samey-sameness (greyscale, shape, etc...) and the constant bombarding of attention-grabbing imagery (emoji, gif, ads...) has desensitised me from visual cues and I zero in on text instead now.
I think you're right. Desensitization has to be a big factor.
I'm certain that I just _like_ text, but I've also noticed recently that I miss very large attention-grabbing print (eg. "SALE" or "FREE WIDGETS JUST GIVE US YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS") as well. I think my brain has started flagging it as misleading noise along with the rest of the detritus.
I attempted a startup to fix meeting culture a few years back. Selling the product was nearly impossible. We got some nibbles and a couple bites, but it eventually became clear that the vast majority of companies just don't care about the problem. They'll tell you it's a problem (because it is) but nobody wants to write a check to fix it.
Humans are lazy and bad at preventing long-term problems. We need to be reminded frequently, otherwise we get complacent and take naps instead of saving our species.
This is why there is a global crisis of confidence in science. B/c science is constantly portrayed as a tool to push agendas and policies (that are maybe even necessary) and not an exploration of facts. It's done so blatantly and transparently that anyone with a skeptical mind is just turned off by the whole thing
This isn't an indictment of science or scientists, but of science reporting. If the story is climate-change related then it's reported. If it's not, then they find some climate change related angle. If they can't then the story is usually dropped.
Science journalism has a lot of issues but I think those problems are across journalism and not especially unique to science. Over referencing familiar narratives, click bait headlines, piss poor editing...you'll find this in all types of news out there.
Should science journalist hold themselves to a better, special standard? True. Especially with the age old war that's waged on it by those who hold power through selling incredibly unscientific world views. But I think the overt actions these forces are more to blame than poor science journalism. People don't like inconvenient facts, people will forever be victims to a voice making a problem go away by denying the problem even exists.
I do not think scientists are entirely blame free, and institutions certainly share part of the blame. University PR departments frequently spin stuff to get attention from journalists (most commonly everything is a huge breakthrough, preferably related to an issue already in the news).
My guess is that the underlying issue is funding.
I also think there are often communication failures from many scientists - for example failing to distinguish between personal opinion, consensus opinion, and well proven things.
On top of that, of course, individual scientists are still fallible and biased like any human being, especially about things they feel strongly about.
A good journalist would speak to multiple people in the field with different opinions, ask them questions like how well proven a theory actually is, etc. Pity they are not more common!
Completely ignoring customers while you "build it and build it and build it and polish it and polish it some more and get to 100% test coverage and make sure the UX is good enough for for your dog to use and then polish some more" is the trap.
In other words: ship it when it barely works and don't improve it until a customer tells you to improve it.
reply