[HN Gopher] Filtering the noise created by vague business advice
___________________________________________________________________
Filtering the noise created by vague business advice
Author : jcrnkovic
Score : 37 points
Date : 2024-02-13 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (crnkovic.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (crnkovic.me)
| KuriousCat wrote:
| Most often the vague business advice shared is purposefully vague
| and is used as a marketing hook by the people giving it out to
| land on lucrative contracts/consultancy deals. For instance even
| for the books you recommended the reviews could go like this:
| - "Some useful information, but mostly common sense and nothing
| that isn't available elsewhere. I think the author struggled to
| make this into a book, as the subject could have been covered in
| far fewer pages and for a lot less money. I bought a few books on
| this day, this is by far my least favourite."
| mariodiana wrote:
| All over YouTube are fresh faced kids telling you how to make 10
| thousand dollars a month with a sure fire side hustle. At some
| point, even someone like me who can be a bit slow on the uptake
| has to realize it's too good to be true.
| neilv wrote:
| Sounds like the new version of the personality who will tell
| you how to get rich quick, if only you pay for their booklet or
| seminar.
|
| (TC;DP: The trick is to become a personality selling get-rich-
| quick booklets or seminars.)
| koliber wrote:
| A lot of this advice is truly good. However, each of those
| "actions" requires you to learn what exactly that thing entails.
| It's vague because it's a gross summary, not because it is
| worthless.
|
| Building a company requires a lot of different things. It's
| impossible to break it down into a single nitty gritty list where
| each item is actionable for someone starting fresh.
|
| Anything can be vague and non-actionable if you've never done it
| before. "Pick a cloud provider" can be just as vague as "Talk to
| prospective customers."
|
| The article does offer a great pointer. The questions the author
| asks are exactly the things you should do if you want to figure
| out how to do those things. Keep asking those questions,
| researching and learning, doing, and asking new questions. Just
| keep doing that and all of a sudden those vague pieces of advice
| will be concrete and actionable initiatives.
|
| Once that happens, and someone asks you for advice, you will
| rattle off a list of foreign sounding concepts that the reader
| will find equally vague and I actionable. You'll be talking from
| the perspective of experience.
| janalsncm wrote:
| The author mentions that these pieces of advice are akin to
| telling prospective pilots that _to fly a plane you need to
| choose a destination, take off, and land_. Yes they are
| generally true, but not in a way which isn't obvious. Similarly
| these "business gurus" are peddling ChatGPT 3.5 level advice
| and passing it off as insightful.
|
| > "Pick a cloud provider" can be just as vague as "Talk to
| prospective customers."
|
| The point is that for people who have never done this before,
| it's not useful because they have no idea where to start. And
| for people who have, it's not useful because they would already
| know how to do it and when to do it.
| xyzelement wrote:
| I don't agree with this. There's value in highlighting areas
| of "unknown but valuable" so the people can think about how
| to fill in the blanks.
|
| EG - if I am not thinking about "cloud provider" but a
| trusted source tells me that's a really important thing, I
| can figure out how to move forward. EG - who do I know whose
| brain I can pick about "Cloud stuff?"
| lkdfjlkdfjlg wrote:
| This seems extremely passive. He asks good questions, but then
| doesn't answer them.
| jcrnkovic wrote:
| Because I don't think I know enough or that I am successful
| enough to give out anything more than generic advice like "pick
| good markets". They are the example questions, not learning
| material.
| rich1day wrote:
| I like your plane analogy and have been thinking in similar
| lines. My conclusion is different though---Not that you should
| find better advice or people to listen to, but that you should
| give up the idea of finding someone who can tell you what to do.
| It's understanding the things no one can tell you that makes for
| business success. The important knowledge is tacit, contextual,
| local.
| airstrike wrote:
| > "Build the landing page and pre-sell before building the
| product" But how do I structure the landing page that will
| convert people into customers? How do I price the product? How do
| I get traffic to the website?
|
| None of those questions disprove the original advice... build a
| landing page without pricing, with some initial idea of what the
| product is, reach out to your ideal customer (prospects) and put
| out ads to get traffic to the website?
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| But what customer wants to waste time on a landing page without
| the key details?
| jcrnkovic wrote:
| I'm not saying that advice is not generally good. I'm saying
| that it's too generic and that it's often told by people who
| don't know how to take action on them-- just like me talking
| about how to fly the plane. Everyone knows the destination, but
| many can describe the steps to that destination. "Running ads"
| is much more complex than opening Google Ads and clicking the
| "Yes Google please run them" button.
| xyzelement wrote:
| Sometimes it takes wisdom and experience to recognize what
| previously-given "vague" advice actually means. Not just in
| business, but in everything. EG, it took me years of
| training/yoga before I really understood what is meant by "engage
| the core" or what my grandma meant by "if everyone jumped off a
| bridge, would you" (I mean the words made sense but it took a
| while to really see people following the herd towards destruction
| to realize how important and hard resisting it is.
|
| I think the value of these things is not necessarily in giving
| you answers but in helping you realize there's some sort of gap.
| Even though "engage the core" doesn't tell me what it means (I
| suspect you can't just tell someone how to do it) - it does make
| me aware that "this is a thing I don't know" - which led me to
| explore the topic and more importantly, recognize when it
| happened ("oh! this is it, I need to cultivate more of this")
|
| For the purpose of this article, it's helpful to distinguish
| between the "what" and the "how." ie: "reach out to customers" is
| helpful if it at least makes me think about "am I doing that? do
| I have reason to think I am doing it enough and well?" For
| someone for example who comes to a business from a technical
| angle first, an honest reflection may lend them to realize "no, I
| don't actually have a history of working with customers and don't
| know how to do it."
|
| And that's a great on the "what" level. Once you see that gap and
| become open-minded to it, you can find paths to the "how." For
| example if I was in those shoes, I would ask myself two
| questions: (1) who do I know who is good at X (eg dealing with
| customers) - can I pick their brain on what this means and (2)
| how do I find 2-3 books/courses/something that can give me a
| foundation in it?
|
| Going from "I never thought about customers" to "I recognize the
| gap, I found a trusted advisor and I built some basic knowledge"
| is the value-add of this type of generic advice.
| jcrnkovic wrote:
| I agree with you, very good points and very helpful! Thanks!
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| The article seems to be talking about "business advice" dispensed
| via tweets and Reddit comments? Why would anyone expect that to
| be of any value?
|
| The answers to any of the follow-up questions posed in the
| article will vary greatly depending on the specifics of the
| business, so it's not surprising that there are no generally
| applicable yet specific answers. Even serious business
| advice/education from a reputable institution can really only
| provide you with an analytical toolbox or framework that you can
| then apply to the specific domain you are active in.
|
| Ultimately, you get what you pay for (and if you're not careful,
| you might not even get that).
| jcrnkovic wrote:
| I agree, yet I also know of some podcasts and books that give
| the same generic advice. All of these can be valuable for
| learning -- I learned a ton from Reddit, YouTube and other
| media.
|
| I also agree that sometimes it can be too specific to the
| nature of the business, yet folks like Rob Walling can
| incredibly easily talk about how to structure emails that go
| out to potential customers, how to potentially price a SaaS
| based on different aspects, etc. Also, in one of his conference
| talks, Jason Cohen goes in depth on how to pick a good market
| with a recurring problem, instead of just saying "pick a good
| market". In "The Mom Test", Rob Fitzpatrick goes over a handful
| of potential conversations, and does not just say "talk to
| prospects".
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-02-13 23:01 UTC)