Modern Products

Products should work for you, not the other way around (and a horrible Outlook example)

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 05:18:55 +0300

When building software, you often encounter a case where you expected user input in some form, but it arrives at another. Excellent products do not reach such situations because they know what to expect from their users. Generally speaking, the situation of receiving “bad” input can be divided to two cases:

You just don’t know how to figure the input out
You know exactly how to figure the input out, because you know of a specific user behavior that leads them to behave differently from what you want them to do, but you insist on your own way

Number 2 is bad. This week I encountered one of the worst examples of this scenario, in one of the most baked products in the world: Microsoft Outlook (of which I’m a fan, by the way).

I input a bunch of email addresses separated by commas, and got this dialog:

I was so pissed off at that. So Outlook doesn’t accept my input, but also has the nerve to tell me it knows what I input, and *literally* asks me to go and do some work that will take me time, but could be solved programatically in a trivial manner. Modern products don’t do such things anymore. In case I didn’t mention it yet - I got pissed off.

The lesson here is simple: if you know of a user behavior that leads users to generate input you’re not adjusted to - just adjust yourself. Be good to your users and work for them. Not the other way around.

Our service is down because Microsoft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 21:16:00 +0200

Running a cloud service surely has its challenges, but I believe it’s the future of consumer products and most technology in general. We (Soluto) rely our service on Microsoft Azure, which we chose as our scalable big data platform because we could build stuff really fast on top of it using our favorite tool: Visual Studio. We now run on hundreds of machines and deal with close to 100M data transactions per day from which we extract quick fascinating insights for our users, which is fun and cool.

For over 24 hours now, we’re down. It’s horrible. Seeing Google Real-Time Analytics show this image is.. well… heart breaking at best, and murderous-thoughts-invoking at worst.

But every cloud provider has its glitches, and to be frank, every software or hardware company ever has had its glitches. We know people are working hard and around the clock to fix this failure, so instead of complaining, we decided to send our community to transmit positive karma in the direction of the people spending their weekend restoring the service instead of with their families. Who knows- maybe it’ll speed the restoration process :)

Here’s the post we published on our Facebook page:

Hi all, sadly Windows Azure is still down which means we’re still down. Here’s how you can help: go to Windows Azure and write on their wall that you love them and appreciate the fact they’ve got people working hard around the clock during the weekend in the holiday season to restore our service. Wish them luck and send positive karma their way :)

What do you think? Would you act differently?

I'm selling my PC museum!

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 23:14:00 +0200

I love tech. Throughout the years I’ve surrounded myself with old tech memorabilia that has some significance in the history of computing, or to me personally. But now, as I plan my move to NYC to open Soluto’s US office, I need to cut down on my stuff. The apartments are much smaller in Manhattan…

So with a heavy heart, I’m selling my PC museum.

I’m using this post as a homage to the stuff I collected over the years, and also as a landing page for potential buyers :)

Note: as far as I know, non of these actually work. Maybe they can be fixed somehow, but they’re sold as non-working machines.

So here’s what I’ve got so far:

Apple PowerBook 180

My favorite piece in the collection. Released in 1992 by Apple, one of the first laptops with a space to put your palms (see other laptops below- no such space). Perfect external condition.

Zenith 171 aka “Lunchbox”

Released in 1985, this not-so-lightweight portable computer is really awesome. I love the lunchbox branding, although weight-wise it’s like a lunchbox full of bricks. Beautiful piece.

Commodore 16

Released in 1984, this is the successor of Commodore 64 (and not the other way around, like I thought when I purchased it). It comes with a tape, lots of documentation and tons of games.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K

Released in 1982, the Specrum is a childhood PC for many Israelis. Originating in the UK, it was more popular in Europe then in the US.

Macintosh SE

Released in 1987, the Macintosh SE had the same case as the original Macintosh. Comes with keyboard (no wire), lots of documentation and some extras.

Apple PowerBook Duo 230

Released in 1992, the PowerBook Duo series were probably the first Netbooks. They were smaller, lighter, and weren’t very successful. But- they left behind some beautiful items.

V-Tech Precomputer 1000

This is a truly remarkable piece. Why? Because it’s a PC aimed for children, to teach them the Basic programming language, released in 1988. Back in the day, some people thought children must learn programming languages. And not because it’s a solid profession, but because that’s how you “speak” to computers- through programming languages. And since in the future there’ll be computers everywhere, children must learn how to speak their language. Then came along companies like Microsoft and Apple that built operating systems - those things that are the foundation for the translation between humans and computers. Beautiful piece. Read another related story here.

Casio Cassiopeia A-11

One of the first Windows CE PDAs, running Windows CE 1.0. Comes with a.. wait for it.. Modem! And the first in the Cassiopeia series.

Packard Bell Statesman

486 processor, 200MB of HD space, 4MB of RAM - a true beast. Notice no space for the palms, shows very early laptop design concept.

Sharp PC-4600

Released in 1987, with a 8088 processor and 40MB of HD, this is a beautiful laptop (although from its weight you would never guess it’s supposed to be portable). And it has a built in carrying handle, kinda like the next item, only much less elegant… —>

Apple Newton eMate 300

A beautiful device, although it’s one of Apple’s flops everyone loves to forget. It existed for less then a year on the market, starting March 1997, and it was supposed to be a cheap laptop replacement running the Newton operating system (and if you don’t know Newton then you’re not a real tech geek).

Tandy 1400HD

Last but not least - my white whale, the beautiful Tandy 1400HD. If you’re interested in the history of personal computing, I recommend you read about Tandy - the leather shop that acquired RadioShack (!) in the 1960s…

Well, that’s about it. I have a bunch more old PDAs but those I can carry with me abroad…

If you’re interested in any of those devices, ping me at roee@soluto.com. One thing though - local pick-up from Tel-Aviv only :)

Is this horrible button placement or am I missing something?

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 12:37:07 +0200

Skype was misbehaving on my PC, so I uninstalled it and went to Skype.com to download and install it again. It’s Skype, possibly the most popular downloadable software in the world, right? So I didn’t think it’ll take me more than 200 milliseconds to find the desired “Download” button.

But it did. Here’s the Skype homepage I saw.

Granted, I don’t have their data, and I don’t even know their goals being part of Microsoft now. But my experience tells me that if their goal was to make Skype accessible to many consumers visiting from a Windows PC, their placement of “Get Skype” (second option on the left in the blue toolbar) or “Join Skype” (white button on top right) is not ideal.

Am I missing something?

Good luck Julie Larson-Green

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 23:20:20 +0200

I’ve been following Microsoft for a while now, fascinated by the disconnect between the huge amounts of money they make, the huge amount of people they effect, and on the other hand the reduction in what marketers would call “brand value”. In other words, while for every Mac in the world there are 10 PCs, in some places around the world it seems PCs just don’t exist.

A couple of weeks back Steven Sinofsky, the guy who ran Windows stepped down and was replaced with Julie Larson-Green. I don’t know either of them in person, but I had a chance of following both of them in the past years. I always thought of Sinofsky as a tough manager with very aggressive beliefs, thinking business-first. Larson-Green on the other strikes me as thinking user-first.

I got a chance to meet both of them in February in Barcelona, when the first customer preview of Windows 8 was shipped. We (Soluto) were invited to this very small event as one of the first 70 apps ever in the Windows Store.

Here’s me with Sinofsky (when I pulled an iPhone to take that picture he was like “an iPhone? Really??” - but it felt in good humor…)

And here’s a picture I took with Julie Larson-Green and Antoine Leblond, a very cool and funny Microsoft SVP

I’d like to wish Julie Larson-Green good luck in her new position. Regardless of your opinion on Microsoft, it is a beast with tons of cash and tons of excellent people. I’m sure they’ve got more interesting stuff up their sleeves, or at least I hope so. An Apple-only world will be very boring.

The hazards of working for an Israeli startup

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 17:48:09 +0200

I was driving to work when the sirens started. This is how Israel’s Road No 1, aka “Jerusalem - Tel Aviv Road” looked when everyone stepped out of their cars to take shelter:

This is me, taking shelter behind my car (give me a break, the sun was in my eyes):

And then I saw two amazing Iron Dome rockets fly up from right next to me, intercepting two rockets on their way to Tel Aviv. Advanced tech to the rescue!

Then I proceeded to work, just another day in an Israeli start-up. Fucking war.

Is boot time still an issue?

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:01:00 +0300

One of the things we do well at Soluto is enable people to understand what runs in their boot, what’s required and what’s not, and allow them to speed boot time. I’m often asked why this matters, because it seems today no one reboots their PC, they put them to sleep. I know I don’t - I reboot my laptop maybe once every two weeks, and my home PC even less.

As it’s a popular feature, there are two ways to look at it from a product management perspective.

The “Let’s Convince The World There’s Value” way. Here, I’ll give it a try. The boot is a process where all that’s required to run in the background starts up. So every service or app you remove from the boot is less weight on your ongoing experience. If you’re supporting someone else through Soluto, they’re probably less savvy and so have absolute crap running in the background, crap that probably raises popups, tray balloons and other shit like that. So you can improve their experience. One last thing, for those who love to use msconfig - many of the apps you remove from your boot will return themselves there as soon as they can. Soluto maintains your configuration by kicking those apps back off the boot. So there’s value, right? But let’s move on to the more interesting and generally smarter perspective.
The “Let’s Look At The Data” way. Here, I’ll give it a try. How can we know if rebooting windows is important to people? Let’s start by looking at how often the average user reboots their PC. Apparently, across our user base, we see an average of 1.16 boots per day. That means on average people boot almost every day. And that’s roughly true across different Windows versions and across countries. Now naturally our user base is tilted towards people for whom boot is important, but we’re talking about a very large amount of people. Why are they rebooting so often? Maybe it’s because they’re unaware of the fact that the Sleep functionality has significantly improved in Windows machines in the past years? Or maybe it’s corporate policy? Or just being old fashioned? Does it matter? When you look at the data, it seems there many millions of people for whom boot time is an important issue. So let’s put a smile on their face! By the way - do YOU know who they are?

So although Soluto’s service now does much more than allowing people to understand their boot and shorten it, boot time apparently is still an issue for many. As a product person, you must be able to step out of your own habits and look at the data. If you ask the right questions you may be surprised to find out you’re actually a minority in a very important group.

If you yourself are suffering from a slow boot and would like to shorten your boot time - go ahead. Apparently the average Soluto user shaves 36 seconds of their boot :)

More info here.

Great work Visa, now I HATE you

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 23:28:00 +0300

Last week I jumped to London to watch the Olympics. Being a huge sports fan the experience was amazing, but there was one thing that drove me crazy.

The London Olympics has several sponsors, most prominently Coca Cola, McDonalds, Visa, Samsung and Acer (when I say “prominently” I mean their effects are felt everywhere through the games).

Before I flew, I discovered that McDonalds’ terms of sponsoring included that no one else in the areas of the games is allowed to sell french fries, unless they come with fried fish (because the classic dish of Fish & Chips could not be banned in the UK). But besides the Fish & Chips exception, no one is allowed to sell french fries around the games. Which pissed me off.

But that didn’t even come close to what Visa did.

Those folks up there at Visa sponsored the Olympics under the limitation that no other credit card could be used to purchase stuff in the Olympics, from a cup of coffee to an official hoodie. If you’ve never been to such an event it’s hard to imagine how huge the venues are, and once you entered a stadium in the morning, you’re not allowed to exit and return with your ticket. Which practically means that once you’re inside, you can either use Visa or cash, that’s it.

And that REALLY pissed me off. As a consumer, I was abused and insulted. On the practical level, I hold both a MasterCard and a Visa, and the terms I get when using my MasterCard in Europe are better than my Visa (in the USA it’s the other way around). But losing a few pennies was not what pissed me off. It was that a major consumer brand chose to abuse simple folks as a way of marketing. And that’s just stupid. Getting a credit card is not something you do in a minute, certainly not in a foreign country. So Visa couldn’t really expect international visitors holding other cards to actually switch to Visa on the spot, right?

What did they expect them to feel? “Oh my gosh, Visa is so awesome, I wish I had a Visa card, when I return home I’m going to get one ASAP”? No!

More probably, like myself, they would say “Why would those assholes do such a thing? They already have their logo smeared all over the place, what did I do wrong to be banned from using my credit card in the largest touristic event in London in the past decade?”

The marketers at Visa are probably more experienced than me, but I still want to give them a small marketing lesson:

If you want people to like you, give them something. If you want people to hate you, take something away from them.

Simple right?

I understand that maybe this campaign was aimed solely at UK residents to switch to Visa, but I still find that abusive.

So what could Visa do? Again I’m not an expert on credit card marketing, but if you follow the bold sentence above, Visa could just appeal to Visa owners by giving them something. A discount for using Visa. A special gift for buying with Visa above some amount. Whatever. As long as you’re giving something to your customers, and not taking away something from those who aren’t.

So great work Visa, now I HATE you.

—

[I spend my days and nights working at the tech startup Soluto, trying to help people enjoy their PCs. Have you tried it yet?]

"The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the..."

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 22:46:11 +0300

“The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”

- Eric Ries (via a-pr)

The startup curve

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 23:23:27 +0300

collaborativefund:

From initiation, to the trough of sorrow, to the promised land — Paul Graham’s view of the startup process, from a Y Combinator meeting in 2008.

image by A VC, via swissmiss

"If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine"

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 00:13:44 +0300

“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine”

- From “Yahoo Is No Longer Dead To Me” by Fred Wilson. I’m a big fan of Marissa Mayer ever since we crossed paths at TechCrunch Disrupt and Garage Geeks (read more here). I hope she can nail it, and by it I mean making Yahoo! cool and successful. There’s a place for Yahoo! in the world, it just needs to find its mojo. Good luck Marissa!

"The trick is to not think about composing the question first. […] Instead, work backwards...."

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 01:14:12 +0300

“The trick is to not think about composing the question first. […] Instead, work backwards. What information do you wish you knew?”

- A great post by Cindy Alvarez of Yammer about interviewing customers. I often find that questions aimed at improving customer insight are actually engineered in a self-destructive way. In many cases such questions are based on internal company lingo no customer can deeply understand, or includes leaps over leaps of assumptions, leading to twisted analysis of results.

One of the most important things we learned at Soluto is to first figure out the language people use, and then use their own language to communicate with them (we used MustHaveScore to achieve that).

Cindy’s point is clear and simple. Imagine you could have a bar chat with your customer, where there were no barriers, and you were their close buddy, and they were all forgiving, never annoyed, never embarrassed, never surprised at/by you. Given what you really want to know, how would you ask your question then?

A highly recommended read for every person who’s interested in customer insight. And if you’re running a web service, you should be.

(I discoverd this post thanks to ExperienceBlogger)

"It is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to..."

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 01:29:33 +0300

“It is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something”

- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/joichi-ito-innovating-by-the-seat-of-our-pants.html

The Importance of Right-Left-Up-Down Standards in Product Design

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 00:59:00 +0300

Yesterday I created a meeting on my Android smartphone (Galaxy Nexus running ICS), filled in all the details, invited a couple of people, and then accidentally cancelled it. I had one of those “WTF just happend??” moments.

So I came back to the screen, and I noticed that the “Done” button was on the right and the “Cancel” button was on the left. I scratched my head, like, literally scratched my head, and tried to figure out why I automatically pressed “Cancel” instead of “Done”. And then I realized. When adding or editing contacts on Android, the “Done” button is on the left, and I do that way more often than creating meetings (which I usually do on my laptop). Below is a screenshot.

As you can see, when adding/editing a contact, the “Done” button is on the left, but when adding/editing a meeting, the “Done” button is on the right. This just begs to trick users into automatically choosing the wrong option.

This realization gave me a strange feeling of deja-vu. I spent a minute trying to figure out why. And then it hit me- on Android, I always had a feeling that the “Copy” button jumps from place to place and has no standard. Sometimes it’s at the bottom, sometimes at the top, and every time I need to copy something I find myself searching for the button and finding it somewhere else.

I thought it doesn’t make sense that the button really is someplace else every time, so I started playing with copying in various scenarios to understand the situation. After a few minutes I got it. When you’re marking uneditable text (e.g. when you’re viewing an email from ifttt), then the copy button appears on the bottom, as the leftmost icon. But when you’re editing text, the copy button appears on the top, as the second icon from the right. Wait WHAT??

See below:

On the one hand, it’s clear that the toolbox for editing text is different from the toolbox for marking uneditable text (e.g. you can’t paste). But on the other hand, deciding the toolbox should be absolutely totally completely different is way too extreme. And what says “absolutely totally completely different” more than putting one at the bottom and the other at the top.

So next time you design an OS, please figure out what your common user functions are (e.g. saving stuff and copying text), and make sure the’y standardized across the user experience. And when I say “standardized” I mean “always in the same place”. Thank you.

Meeting Eric Schmidt, Insights about Scaling a Start-up

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 12:14:00 +0300

One of the great things about Soluto is that we’re backed by an excellent team of investors, ranging from big-name VCs to private current and former senior executives in various companies. One of our investors is Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, through his personal fund (called Innovation Endeavors) that he founded with Dror Berman.

Eric recently came to visit Israel, and between meeting our prime minister and our president, came to listen first-hand to the start-ups he’s invested in (a total of 8 start-ups in Israel). So we all gathered in the new beautiful offices of BillGuard, our neighbors on Silicon Boulevard and presented who we are and what we do to Eric.

It felt like our presentation went really well, with Eric asking various super-smart questions, and after we finished, he raised one point that I think is worth sharing. He asked (I’m using my own words here, but the key message is the same):

What in your service is so special that it’ll push to scale? What inherent property of your service is such that as you grow, you will grow more and more? Because if you cannot find such a property, then all you’re counting on is luck, and luck doesn’t scale.

I gave an elaborate answer. I talked about focusing the company’s efforts on creating such an experience that will compel users to share the news about this amazing service with their friends, and how we believe this experience a user goes through is what differentiates great scalable services from those that remain, well, meh.

This answer sucks. Not because it’s not what we’re focusing on, and not because it’s wrong. But because it’s generic. And by being generic, it missed the depth of the question. About 15 minutes later I was excited to realize I actually have a great answer, but by then it was too late to chase Eric and correct myself (and it would have probably seemed super-lame if I did).

I don’t want to focus on our own specific answer (although it’s REALLY great), but rather on some insights I had while thinking about the question, and understanding a) how brilliant this question is; b) how important having an answer is and c) how brilliant Eric Schmidt is (and this is not ass-kissing, he has already invested..)

If you ask me, the single most important factor in the success of startups that became immensely successful is, put simply in one word, luck. If you want two words, you can take Good Karma. I’m talking about the likes of Facebook, Skype, Dropbox, SalesForce, Google and others. This luck usually manifests itself in the form of amazing timing between the market and the company, usually around some technological or psychological inflection point.

For Google the inflection point was related to a change in advertisers’ perception of the web as a viable channel for ad communication, combined with a growing number of consumers searching for stuff on the web. For Skype the inflection point was related to the width of the “Internet Pipes” globally. For SalesForce it was a combination of more and more businesses understanding the benefits of CRM, combined with a growing completexity and cost of “on premise” CRM solutions. For all the companies I mentioned you’ll be able to find other companies who did practically the same thing a couple of years earlier but never reached massive scale, and another bunch of companies who tried to do the same a year or two later, but again weren’t able to reach massive scale. A short disclaimer - some companies succeed without riding such an inflection point, but those are usually moderate successes (give me one example of a tech company that reached >$50B value without it).

So I think luck, usually in the form of timing, is the main differentiator for growing huge. However, there are several points to make here. Luck is certainly not enough, and most of those companies who reached massive scale had:

1. A strong product that solved a huge market problem.

2. The ability to listen to the market and maneuver accordingly.

3. Great ability to execute - build stuff fast enough and at a sufficient level of quality.

4. A technological solution that is far from trivial, especially at scale.

The list above is what I thought before Eric’s question. But Mr Schmidt added another, fifth point: 5. An inherent property of the service that pushes it to scale.

Let’s try to analyze the this point for the companies I previously mentioned:

- Google: I’m not familiar with the details of Google’s original search algorithm, but I believe one of The initial important factors was user-clicks on search result pages. In other words, the more people used Google, the better the results got, which led to happier users, which led then to tell their friends, which meant more people used Google, etc..

- Facebook & Skype: those are easy. Whenever you can detect a “network effect” you have such an interest scale property.

- Dropbox: many people believe that Dropbox’s massive scale was caused by its brilliantly executed referral plan, designed by Sean Ellis. But still, what underlies that? Maybe people’s willingness to go to lengths in order to get more free storage? What is so special in storage? Can this be replicated everywhere? Probably not. So I’m not sure here, I’ll invite Sean to answer…

The key insight for startups here is -

Think about your own product/service. Does it have an inherent property that’ll push it to scale? If not, are you ok with it? Or should you go searching for such a property?

"Devs Love Bacon: Everything you need to know about Machine Learning in 30 minutes or less"

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 02:37:21 +0300

“Devs Love Bacon: Everything you need to know about Machine Learning in 30 minutes or less”

- Great title, great delivery. Learn.

Devs Love Bacon: Everything you need to know about Machine Learning in 30 minutes or less

dragoni: The Manipulation Matrix I offer a simple decision...

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 02:03:03 +0300

dragoni:

The Manipulation Matrix

I offer a simple decision support tool for entrepreneurs, employees, and investors to be used long before product is shipped or code is written; even before customer development has begun. The Manipulation Matrix does not try and answer which businesses are moral or which will succeed. Nor does it describe what can and cannot become a habit-forming technology. The matrix seeks to help you answer not, “Can I hook users?” but “Should I attempt to?”

To use the Manipulation Matrix, the maker needs to ask two questions. First, “Will I use the product myself?” and second, “Will the product help users materially improve their lives?”

The Facilitator

The Peddler

The Entertainer

The Dealer

The Art Of Manipulation is a must read!

"First, Asus has done a lot of work to make the machine look and work just like the Air. Second, by..."

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 19:03:00 +0300

““First, Asus has done a lot of work to make the machine look and work just like the Air. Second, by not putting much thought into the touchpad, the company blew it.””

- As a long time PC guy who’s been comparing PCs and Macs lately, I absolutely agree with this analysis.

http://pandodaily.com/2012/06/24/why-does-every-pc-notebooks-trackpad-suck-or-why-microsoft-is-building-its-own-hardware/

"Of course there are many differences between startup fundraising and Nigerian email scams"

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 14:21:19 +0300

“Of course there are many differences between startup fundraising and Nigerian email scams”

- A brilliant article about lessons to be learned from Nigerian email scammers:

Essentially, scammers face an optimization problem. Touching a huge number of potential victims is easy. The real cost is the time spent converting a prospective victim into an actual victim. The scammer has to spend time to build the victim’s confidence to the point where they wire some amount of their money to the scammer. The opportunity cost here is massive. Spending time on a prospect that ultimately gets cold-feet is the worst possible outcome for the scammer. Not only did they fail to collect any money, but they wasted a bunch of time getting a “no.” The longer that victim took to ultimately back out, the higher the scammer’s cost. Since time is a real constraint, finding a way to steer clear of people who start a conversation but won’t ultimately send money is just as important as nurturing the rare victim who will end up handing over his or her cash.

…

Now, re-read the preceding two paragraphs, and replace the word “scammer” with “entrepreneur”, and the word “victim” with “investor”.

I’ll wait while you do it.

Full piece here: http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/25/what-entrepreneurs-can-learn-from-nigerian-email-scammers/

Why founders should not hire a Product Manager

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 12:22:24 +0300

In the past years I’ve been meeting many founders before they raise money, to help them around product, marketing and generally what’s important and when. One phenomena I keep seeing is one of the founders will ask “where can we find a good product manager?”

My answer is almost always “You don’t need a product manager. The product is the most important thing you’ve got to deal with right now, so one of you should do it.”

This may seem a shallow point of view, so I’ll elaborate on the insights behind it.

When you found a startup, there are important things and unimportant things. On another dimension, there are things that require lots of actual work (like coding), and things that do not require lots of actual work (like defining your marketing strategy). Surprisingly enough, in most cases at the very early stages of a startup, what’s important is what actually requires lots of work.

For most startups in that position, there’s nothing more important than product. You need to code it, true, but what “product” means is “what do we code?”

I often encounter two archetypes of founders who will ask me about hiring a product manager:

1. Coders who can write great code, but don’t know what they should do, so they are looking for someone who will tell them what to do.
2. People with business background who have no idea how to build products, and are looking for someone they will explain “the vision” to, and he will make it happen (while they masturbate around big words like “go-to-market strategy).

To the first group (coders) I say: if all you know is code, you’re not good enough founders. You need to think about your users, imagine their pains and needs, build it for them. Become the product managers. Or alternatively add another co-founder who can bring that skill to the founding team. The first product manager in a startup must be one of the founders.

To the second group (suits) I say: if you can’t build anything, you have no justification to be calling yourselves founders. a key skill for the founding team is to know how to build the damn thing, and if you cannot, it means the investors’ money will be spent on your salaries while you contribute nothing but big words (in reality I use much harsher words in those situations, but I don’t want to make this post NSFW). Don’t get me wrong, the business side is critical to the success of startups, but 1) mostly at later stages and; 2) Too often I see a group of 3-4 founders who have no idea how to build stuff, expecting they can outsource everything including the product side. Granted, sometimes those people succeed, but then it’s not interesting.

So if you’re building a startup, ask yourself which of the founders can be a great product manager. Build your thing, raise some money, and when that product-founder simply cannot do enough product work because he spends 13 hours a day doing something else that’s more important, then hire a product manager.