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But what if I want a faster horse?

(rakhim.exotext.com)
1525 points saeedesmaili | 8 comments | 11 Apr 25 11:39 UTC | HN request time: 1.753s | source | bottom
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cjs_ac ◴[11 Apr 25 12:22 UTC] No.43652999[source]▶
For any given thing or category of thing, a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing, but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing. For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into cars like those marques.

If you're designing a consumer-oriented web service like Netflix or Spotify or Instagram, you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.

Think about web browsers. The first popular browser was Netscape Navigator; then, Internet Explorer came onto the scene. Mozilla Firefox clawed back a fair chunk of market share, and then Google Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch. In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.

So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants. (This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.) But who knows - maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business.

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1. soco ◴[11 Apr 25 12:38 UTC] No.43653102[source]▶
Then, how could a business identify its (or market's) trend-setters, enthusiasts, or whatever we call them, which will push towards something new? I see this as essential for either making the business better, shinier, or to avoid losing users.
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2. _kush ◴[11 Apr 25 12:45 UTC] No.43653159[source]▶
It has to be built by those enthusiasts
3. ozim ◴[11 Apr 25 12:46 UTC] No.43653167[source]▶
That’s leg work you have to do on your own.

Just like football scouts need to actually visit some niche teams and watch not that interesting stuff to find talent before it is too late.

With tech it might be easier because you might create niche groups so those people come to you.

Just like PG created HN. Nowadays HN is too mainstream so all ideas here are seem already popular so it is like going to scout high school t am that won local championship everyone already knows which players are lined for pro contracts.

4. another-dave ◴[11 Apr 25 12:49 UTC] No.43653190[source]▶
By risk taking on good ideas rather than always trying to pivot your way from the status quo.

Product-Market fit is great if you're developing a SaaS business but it's not necessarily going to give you new inventions — something new is speaking to a potential gap in the market that doesn't currently exist.

5. cjs_ac ◴[11 Apr 25 12:53 UTC] No.43653230[source]▶
By participating in the community. Content moderation on HN is so much better than on Facebook because dang is one of us, whereas on Facebook, it's a team of people in a developing country, in a different cultural context. Netflix needs to be run by film enthusiasts, not UX engineers trying to disguise the fact that all the good IP has been pulled back to the streaming platforms of the original producers. Spotify needs to be run by music enthusiasts, not people pushing covers of pop songs to avoid paying royalties to the original artists. And so on.

Indie Hackers is full of people trying to flog their shit AI-powered marketing SaaS, because they've never done anything other than software engineering, so they don't know any good problems to solve. There are uncountably many good problems out there, each with thousands of people who would pay you money to solve them, but those people don't know their problems can be solved by a computer, so you have to go out into the world to find them yourself.

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6. germinalphrase ◴[11 Apr 25 13:23 UTC] No.43653489[source]▶
The Hustler and the Nerd are the co-founding duo. Domain expertise is an obvious plus, but a “non-technical” Domain Expert is a third wheel.
7. bsoles ◴[11 Apr 25 14:44 UTC] No.43654379[source]▶
> ... because they've never done anything other than software engineering, so they don't know any good problems to solve.

That is indeed a big problem with software engineering/engineers today. No other expertise other than being a framework monkey.

8. edmundsauto ◴[11 Apr 25 21:06 UTC] No.43658568[source]▶
Teams should identify their drivers of key metrics and do power user analysis based on this. A halfway decent analytics team should be thinking this way.

Ultimately, analytics are just a view into the business. This thread is complaining about doctors not using microscopes when diagnosing system issues - sometimes a narrow slice is important, sometimes you need to zoom out. If you focus on your "early adopters" or power users exclusively, without understanding how they affect the business, then you are at risk of building things that most of your user base doesn't want.

Power User Analysis: https://andrewchen.com/power-user-curve/