Maor Shlomo: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Okay, so this is kind of the whole journey. I know there's a few other elements I want to touch on, but let me point out a few things that stood out to me that I think might be helpful to folks. The first is right at the beginning, coming back to a lesson you shared at the beginning, which is build for specific people. So initially it was build for yourself, build for your girlfriend, build for the Scouts program, and then it was built for these three friends, just building it, sitting with them, building the things they need to use it, which is really interesting because a lot of times the advice you get is look for pull, look for people with problems to solve. You almost went the opposite. You're like, "Use my product. I need you as a favor. Use my product and help me make it better." Absolutely. Also, I don't know though. I think maybe paradigms are changing, but there are some things that I don't believe in is MVPs, first and foremost, is like if you're building something that people will not be able to use or is not good enough, especially these days where it's so much easier to build software, so the attention span for people to actually try out new software products is getting shorter and shorter, so, yeah, pick a bunch of people that, I don't know, owe you something or have any reason to use your product when it's bad, build for them, be there physically. I remember that even when we passed 20K users, 50K users and 100K users, it was still very tough to get the right feedback. So I would bring 20, 30 people to a room together, almost like a focus group or a small hackathon. I'll do that every other week, just to get feedback, and it was so much easier than any other thing. It was the same thing that I tried developing when we were just three users and five users. So, yeah, build it for them. They can come from different backgrounds. Again, something else that I don't really empathize with or agree with is you have to have a certain ICP. It's not necessarily about the profile of a person. More of what they're trying to do is way more important. So you can have different types of people, but they're all trying to do the same thing. They're trying to build a tool. I think some of those people should remember the tool you're building is a specific kind of tool that helps you build things and so these lessons don't necessarily apply. In a lot of cases you want to be really specific with ICP, because there's one thing you accomplish with this thing versus this very horizontal product.…

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