Gustaf Alströmer: observation

Transcript context

…Gustaf Alströmer Totally. And it takes a lot to convince someone to pay attention to anything. I guess that just comes back to why it's so important that your product is solving a real pain and not just a nice little toy that is better than what's out there, but not so much better that you're like, "I need this right now." So maybe just along those lines, do you have any thoughts on just the importance of that pain and just how critical that is? Gustaf Alströmer I actually recorded... I'm happy of these videos, but I've recorded two videos on YouTube as part of YC Startup School last fall. You can go watch them on YouTube right now. One of them is how to talk to users and the other one is how you sell or how you use sales. The one about talking to users, I think there's a difference in asking someone, "Do you have a problem with X, Y, Z? Is this podcasting setup working for you?" And people say, "Yeah, it's kind of working." But if you are a podcasting setup experts and you watch people use some other thing that's really shitty, they might also think that it's pretty good. But you have to watch them do it. And the best way for you to figure out what is the intensity of the problem is not to ask them but to watch them or to watch them solve the thing that they do. You know how a lot of non-technical people don't know how to automate things? So they will do the same thing in Excel like a million times by just tapping because that's the only thing that they know and they're not technical enough to write some kind of script to do it, and you just have to watch those people to just feel the pain. You can't actually ask them how difficult is it to do X, y, z because they won't even know that it's that difficult to them. So the best thing I've learned about how to discover the pain is to watch people, have them screen share, have them walk you through their daily workflow about the area where you're doing some discovery. That is the best thing. I'll give you another example. So there's a bunch of waste companies that are doing EV charging for electric cars and they're like, "What are the problems in EV charging?" And I was like, "Just rent an EV and go and charge at all the non Tesla chargers and see what they say, see what you experience." And the truth is that it's just like garbage. A lot of EV charting systems are just so shitty and the apps are terrible. You just have to just use them yourself to know how bad it is. It's cool how often it just comes back to, "Just go do the thing. Do things that don't scale." Classic YC advice. I want to come back to something you mentioned that I want to pull a thread on as the technical co-founder, being technical early on, just to cover that. So I know YC looks to... Having a technical founder is an important variable in you're deciding to accept a company. Say someone doesn't have a technical co-founder, do you have any advice for what they could do, like what often can work?…

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