"Understand your users. That's the key." Paul Graham, if he could only give startups one piece of advice:
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@ycombinator UNDERSTANDING YOUR USERS IS KEY. 🫡🫡
@ycombinator If you understand your users deeply enough, they’ll pay you to keep building. If you don’t, you’ll just end up explaining to your mom why your ‘ten loyal users’ are actually just your friends and one very confused guy from Reddit.
@ycombinator understanding who your user is an iterative process
@ycombinator Knowing your users reveals their unmet needs. That fuels truly impactful innovation.
@ycombinator Great advice 👏 your users/clients are the whole reason you're doing what you're doing. They create the underlying cause for your work, paying attention to their needs and wants should be priority #1 😎
@ycombinator We couldn't agree more. AI tech builders need to understand non-tech business users and make it more accessible. We are doing our part to help bridge that gap.
@ycombinator Solve a problem you have and you have an idea 💡
@ycombinator easiest way to do this is by being a user yourself
@ycombinator You need to understand your users' pain points very deeply.
@ycombinator lol are you serious with this? VCs enclose the industry, shove out any human centred design and then wear us as a skin suit? Fuck off.
@ycombinator Understand your users and solve their problem. Got it.
@ycombinator This advice is famously simple to say but so tough to master. Most teams hear what they want to hear, not whats really being said by users. The real skill is learning to separate your own bias from their feedback.
@ycombinator Got it but: No users yet. No product yet. No team yet. Building. Learning. Moving forward.
@ycombinator Talk to users. Most simple and underrated advice cause I see so many folks and myself included in the past just put your head down and build the “perfect” product. But it doesn’t work like that
@ycombinator @peoplewant_ helps me understand users on HN
@ycombinator Understanding users is easy to say but hard to practice who on your team actually listens to customers?
@ycombinator Love the message! @bchesky said many times in interviews “it’s better to build a product that 10 people absolutely love rather than one that 1,000 people just kind of like”.
@ycombinator We would say that’s a great idea!
@ycombinator yeah, user insights validated our pivot completely.
@ycombinator missing the point of startups, it's not about users, it's about solving problems
@ycombinator Waiting for @paulg to say: "I never said that. It's ridiculous"😂