[HN Gopher] Segment Found Product Market Fit
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Segment Found Product Market Fit
Author : gmays
Score : 54 points
Date : 2022-08-28 16:42 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bip.so)
(TXT) w3m dump (bip.so)
| aaur0 wrote:
| This post is gold. We are going through our journey of finding
| PMF. The points mentioned here are what we learned the hard way.
| Highly recommend it to anyone who wants to build a startup or
| works for an early-stage company.
| phanis wrote:
| Yes! I am thinking discovering PMF is the toughest part of a
| startup journey. Wish you the very best in the journey!
| allenu wrote:
| > This case study makes me wonder if PMF is only accidental. Many
| startups I know have accidentally stumbled on the idea that made
| them big. This is one such story.
|
| It does seem accidental to me in this particular case.
|
| The more I read about successful product-market fit, the more I'm
| convinced that even if it's a real thing, knowing about it
| doesn't actually lead to any useful advice other than "keep
| pivoting until you've made something people really want" (or else
| you run out of money).
|
| The term "product-market fit" makes it seem like a concept that
| is measurable. Maybe, it's measurable, but only after you've
| achieved it. So what does that tell you exactly? If you're not
| successful, you don't have it. If you are successful, you must
| have had product market fit. Amazing. Now go forth and make stuff
| that has product-market fit. Good luck.
|
| It feels more honest to just just call it "making a product
| people desperately want and will you give you money for". It
| would simplify a lot of discussions. "We worked on this product
| and didn't know if people desperately wanted it or would give us
| money for it. Then we released it and realized people didn't want
| it and would not give us money for it. The lesson we learned is
| we should make something people desperately want and will give us
| money for."
|
| Apologies for being negative, but I think I've watched too many
| videos and read too many articles from successful
| people/companies and am starting to think that survivorship bias
| and luck gives too much authority to advice that is actually not
| that useful.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > Apologies for being negative, but I think I've watched too
| many videos and read too many articles from successful
| people/companies and am starting to think that survivorship
| bias and luck gives too much authority to advice that is
| actually not that useful.
|
| I agree with you. How many founders are able to find success
| twice? How many thrice? It's _shockingly_ low, even amongst the
| most respected tech magnates.
|
| Here's an example I like to use which I'm sure will be
| controversial, and I want to preface this by saying I've
| personally met and respect Justin Kan. But if you look at his
| history of starting companies, he only gets worse with time.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Kan
|
| He started with twitch which sold for just under $1 billion,
| then had SocialCam which sold for $60 MM, he then sold Exec for
| an undisclosed amount, and after that his initiatives shut down
| or are ongoing. Obviously he still has time for some big exits,
| but the trend doesn't make it look like he's learning.
| solarmist wrote:
| Combining this with another reply elsewhere about learning
| sales.
|
| I wonder if the problem is before the idea had to be so
| valuable to get funded despite Justin being bad at sales, now
| he's gotten better so he doesn't need to refine the idea
| nearly as much to get interest and investment.
|
| In other words the friction of being bad at sales makes them
| work twice or mores times as hard refining the idea. I'm not
| sure what to call this broken feedback loop, lower burden of
| proof, something else, all of the above?
| mittermayr wrote:
| I think the hardest part about this (the article is inherently
| tainted a bit by survivorship bias of course) is to know when
| exactly it is time to move on from an idea, and when to try a bit
| harder with it. A fantastic idea posted on the wrong forum and/or
| at the wrong time feels EXACTLY like you've missed PMF
| (especially for someone doing this for the first time). I believe
| there is a lot of history of this right here in the HN archives.
|
| Just because nobody picks up on it, doesn't automatically
| disqualify it. Unless, of course, you're 400k of Google ads deep
| without much of a sign-up, then you might consider moving on.
|
| I'd argue that it's next to impossible to know if an idea has
| failed reaching PMF, when you haven't solved the "getting it in
| front of the right people" part yet.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| It isn't always hard to know when to move on.
|
| I think a lot of it depends on how big the exploration space is
| around the product you are trying to build. Building a "I'm
| confused" feedback button for students attending college
| lectures doesn't provide much roadway for exploration. You can
| find out pretty fast whether the product has legs.
|
| When the product is something like "a low code developer
| platform", the space of building is so rich it would be worth
| building for long stretches of time to learn the right thing to
| make. The difficult part is in nailing the right product. I
| would keep working on something like this until someone else
| has won the market.
|
| I am not judging ideas by saying one of the above is better
| than the other. It's quite possible discovering the lecture
| solution gets you to a bigger business faster and can create
| more impact and a bigger company. It just seems like it's easy
| to weigh the design space of the product, the current state of
| the market to figure out how long you should work on it.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I'll pick on Wordle or Among Us. There was something about
| pandemic times that made those work, but they could have been
| done any time in the past 10+ years and gotten less attention.
| Among Us even predates the pandemic. It was just before its
| time, but not by too much.
| goopthink wrote:
| Peter Reinhardt (Segment's CEO) goes in depth about this journey
| (and more) in the "Learning How To Sell" episode of Patrick
| O'Shaughnessy's "Invest Like the Best" podcast. Likely the
| original source for this post: -
| https://open.spotify.com/episode/61c5XhkcxEave8Cd6j55w1?si=F... -
| https://american-podcasts.com/podcast/invest-like-the-best/p...
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Pieter Levels says that he's tried something like 70+ ideas to
| make money and only 3 of them have really made some money, and
| only one have done it substantially.
|
| So his conclusion is that you need to get good at trying new
| things / shoot goals, because it DOES come down to "I have no
| idea what will stick". But the more shots you shoot, the more
| likely.
|
| But also-- most of us are in software, and every product we build
| (including Segment) has compounding effects towards the next
| thing we build. The frameworks we use or build can inform our
| next thing. The account flows. The databases and CI/CD we get
| used to. For every thing we try, we get a little better at the
| next thing.
|
| I've found that "launching ideas" from a napkin sketch to working
| prototype has become significantly easier. Used to take me a
| month+ to launch a crud idea/prototype; now it takes me a
| weekend.
|
| So the limiting factor for me isn't building/launching anymore...
| it's customer discovery and sales.
| bradgranath wrote:
| Goes to show just how much of a scam VC really is.
| echelon wrote:
| Worked out for the VCs just fine.
|
| And who would realistically try these things without VC? Not
| many of us are so fortunate to self fund.
| ok_dad wrote:
| > Worked out for the VCs just fine.
|
| Scams usually work out for the scammer, yes.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Worked out for those who acquired Segment too-- they make real
| money, AND provide a real, very useful service!
| Jasper_ wrote:
| The posts like this are all fantastic, because they're all "we
| built a dumb product in two weeks that nobody wanted, and then
| when that didn't work, we built a data harvesting rig and
| everybody threw money at us". It's just the Mitch Hedberg joke
| about "that inspired me to make a movie about a gorilla"
|
| My other favorite was the one that started with a dating app,
| then a corporate benefits HR package solution, before eventually
| finding "product market fit" and "success" by turning it into an
| internet payments company, with the founder going on all the
| podcasts to talk about all the lessons they learned. Then they
| shut down a year later, with the founder getting a hefty
| parachute for their wonderful invasive innovations they
| generously thrust into our world.
| auggierose wrote:
| So how would you classify what Apple did with the iPod and then
| the iPhone? Did it define and shape the future? Or did they find
| out what the market wanted and solve for it?
|
| It seems to me both approaches are valid. One approach builds the
| future that most people imagine and want. The other one builds a
| future that one person, or a small group of people, imagine and
| want. Certainly the former is more likely to succeed, but the
| latter might yield more interesting results if successful.
| ttul wrote:
| This story reminds me that the most successful entrepreneurs are
| often those who have wealth to begin with, which enables them to
| keep playing with ideas until the random walk bumps into
| something that customers actually want.
|
| Segment's founders may not have raised another $600K had their
| search ultimately failed. And did the founders have the cash
| themselves to try again? The panic attacks indicate perhaps not.
| remram wrote:
| This seems to be Segment: https://segment.com/
|
| I don't know what they do.
|
| I couldn't find the open source library in question either.
| DanielVZ wrote:
| > Segment collects events from your web & mobile apps and
| provides a complete data toolkit to every team in your company
| remram wrote:
| But what does that mean? Do they receive event data or
| timeseries and graph it?
| MAGZine wrote:
| they forward those events to all of your other systems
| (e.g. CRM, webhook, helpdesk). they can also do some data
| health/quality monitoring.
| joegahona wrote:
| No. There is no data visualizer inside of Segment. It's a
| very expensive customer-data-infrastructure tool.
| phanis wrote:
| You may find it at
| https://github.com/orgs/segmentio/repositories?type=all
| remram wrote:
| Which is the one mentioned in the article, which is touted to
| be the single thing responsible for their success?
|
| > This open-source library had only 580 lines of code
|
| I'm sure it's in there, but even filtering out forks there's
| 289 results.
| lovingCranberry wrote:
| https://segment.com/opensource/
|
| I believe the library in question is "analytics.js"
| remram wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Direct link: https://github.com/segmentio/analytics.js Now
| deprecated and replaced by
| https://github.com/segmentio/analytics-next
| sdoering wrote:
| I tried to understand the segment analytics open source sdk
| coming from the apache unomi project's documentation. It
| seems unomi is using analytics.js syntax in tracking users.
|
| I still don't get the benefit, though.
|
| I know quite a few analytics tools and have implemented my
| fair share of these. But still. I just run into a wall every
| time I try to understand the OS analytics.js benefits.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I think for a lot of founders transitioning over from being
| developers (I followed this path), it's important to create a
| simple product which is free and gets at least 1000 uses.
|
| This, I feel, is a missing critical step. To create something
| which can stand on its own, and is actually useful, is much
| harder especially when you have been working for a company for
| sometime, where a lot of things that you do don't actually matter
| (not because you are bad, it is just the nature of companies).
|
| A lot of startup reading material talks about immediately
| charging for your product and while I agree charging is the only
| proof of a viable business, it is in my opinion step number 2.
|
| Step 1 is building something which people use repeatedly and this
| product instinct is almost like a muscle that needs to be
| trained.
|
| Once you create something which gets used a 1000 times (either by
| 1000 different people or a smaller number of people using it
| multiple times), you get a taste for it and almost a subconscious
| feel for what works and what won't.
| afhammad wrote:
| Its difficult to say which is the correct approach, but one
| thing I know is pricing is very hard and getting it wrong is
| costly. Getting usage first allows for constant valuable
| feedback but also establishes a value on the product within the
| user's mind. What is this worth to them? How much time is it
| saving them?
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