Making what people want isn’t enough, you have to share it

https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com/be-a-prolific-sharer-31bfdfb50a40

by johnwheeler • 10 years ago

269 118 10 years ago

blog.oldgeekjobs.com

sosuke• 10 years ago

When you do share it try not to get discouraged if no one looks at it, is dismissive of it or even becomes inflammatory of you sharing your own creation.

Kind of like an extension of the quote: "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."

moron4hire7• 10 years ago

I think if people are ignoring you, it's a signal that you're not making something people care about.

In contrast, negative criticism is a signal that you're working on something people care about, you've just not figured out either the product or the marketing message correctly.

Universally positive feedback is probably a sign that nobody is paying attention, but they like you for some reason--either you're a celebrity or you're new and people think you're brave just for trying.

Negative criticism is probably the only useful criticism you're likely to get. Few people will bother with posting a positive, even-minded critique of a project. So hang on to those "haters." They're the ones you need to care about the most.

johnwheeler5• 10 years ago

I think if people are ignoring you, it's a signal that you're not making something people care about.

Not necessarily. This is the third time I posted this story on HN (HN allows a small number of reposts), and who knows why it got ignored the first two times. It could have been timing. It might have been the title and organization of my content, which I tweaked on subsequent submissions.

I've never submitted anything that had universally positive feedback, so I wouldn't know what to make of that, but negative criticism isn't necessarily worth much if it isn't constructive.

And, even constructive criticism needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It's likely to have a lot more weight if it's coming from someone who has been where you want to go; otherwise, it needs to be scrutinized for motive and value. (i.e. sometimes people are looking for validation themselves, and criticism is a cheap way of throwing things out there and getting feedback).

ant6n• 10 years ago

Positive feedback can be very motivating. If it helps you keep going, it can be very useful.

crdoconnor2• 10 years ago

I'm not so sure negative criticism is always useful.

First Dropbox attempt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

"The only problem is that you have to install something."

I don't think these things really inhibited Dropbox from taking off.

jakobegger• 10 years ago

Positive feedback is really important because it keeps you going. Without positive feedback you'll give up.

Negative feedback is important because it tells you what you are doing wrong. It can be really hard to swallow, and my first response is usually to dismiss it for some reason. But if you try hard to understand why that person thinks that your product is crap, you'll almost always find a sensible reason, and a way to improve it.

TeMPOraL10• 10 years ago

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."

Personally I believe that if you have something original and the idea gets "stolen", you should be proud of yourself. You've just done something good for the world[0]. What really matters for humanity is that something was done, not who did it, and especially not who did it first.

[0] - assuming the idea itself isn't evil.

swalsh• 10 years ago

This sounds nice in theory, and perhaps if we lived in a different type of society that would even be true. We don't though, we live in the world where our rewards are tied to our accomplishments. those rewards are the incentives for us to do the work, it might not be 100% of the incentive, but it's a large part. Of course, if someone steals your idea, but wins the race, they're probably executing better. That's capitalism, that's the beauty of competition. First mover advantage is often a disadvantage. You have to pay for all the mistakes. If you're an established player, you can afford it. If you're brand new though, you might not be able to.

vvanders• 10 years ago

Yeah, but when it happens to something you care about it can be fucking brutal from an emotional standpoint.

Rami Ismail has talked pretty extensively[1] about this. He referenced it as one of his darker periods of game development when Ridiculous Fishing got cloned.

[1] http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/4/24/4257958/cloned-at-...

ZainRiz• 10 years ago

I had this happen to me and that's how I consoled myself after someone took my idea had way more success than I did. It helped that I wasn't trying to monetize the idea in the first place.

I had made a religious app for Muslims to keep track of how many of their daily prayers they had missed (since they're supposed to make them up). I called it "Islamic Debt Tracker" and it was downloaded a few thousand times: http://www.appsgalery.com/apps/islamic-debt-tracker-255723

Then someone else came around, used the same core UI, but gave it a way better name "Missed Prayers" and had more than 10x more success than I did. Now I even see the same feature and UI that I designed copied over in other apps across multiple smart phone platforms.

I just remember that my whole reason for making this was because there was no tool like this available and I wanted something like this to exist in the world. And now it does thanks to me and people are benefiting from it.

And lesson learned: Names are Important!

crpatino• 10 years ago

You also need to be concerned with the posibility that an opportunistic party will steal the idea, pattent it, and then try to monetarize it in some way that does not involve (and might even get in the way of) actual implementation.

Pattent trolls come to mind, but are certainly not the only way to do that.

unclebucknasty2• 10 years ago

What really matters for humanity is that something was done, not who did it

I wish we lived in a society that worked that way. The unfortunate truth is that having your idea stolen means you can do something great for society and end up homeless and/or under considerable stress.

vorg• 10 years ago

if no one looks at it, is dismissive of it, or even becomes inflammatory of you sharing your own creation, ... people stealing an idea

Far more likely than people stealing an idea is attacks by the people with vested interests in something else threatened by the idea. If someone's inflammatory of you, perhaps they're "useful idiots" being prodded by other parties trying to kill off what you're doing by discouraging you.

ronilan• 10 years ago

If you "liberate yourself from giving a shit" how would you give shit about "making what people want"?

dkrich2• 10 years ago

I think he's referring specifically to giving a shit about people's criticism or even lack of interest, not about the product itself.

Just about anyone who has publicly launched a product or idea knows what it's like to have your ego crushed by people who take one look and dismiss work that you've likely spent a lot of time and enthusiasm on. That can hurt a lot, and you really do have to develop a thick skin to a point where you don't get discouraged by criticism and dismissive attitudes (which frankly seem to be the default on this forum).

delegate• 10 years ago

I thought there was something wrong with my projects, with the code or with myself when people did that. And probably, there is :).

But as I get older I try to give less of a shit about what others say.

I've also noticed that people troll more when they are unhappy about something in their life - I know it because I do it too - I'm more negative or dismissive when things aren't going quite as I'd like them or when I have an argument with my wife or something...

pjlegato4• 10 years ago

Granted, people are often unnecessarily rude about their criticism and dismissive attitude, but -- they're the default because, frankly, almost all projects are not actually worth much (monetarily or otherwise), irrespective of how much time and enthusiasm the creators put into them. There's no need to be rude as a critic, but false praise is even worse than accurate criticism as it is actively deceptive. We are not in kindergarten. Stroking people's egos and making people think they did a good job when they didn't is not why we come here.

Alex3917• 10 years ago

Even if you make something people want, most people still won't like it at all for quite a long time.

TeMPOraL10• 10 years ago

You have to try and detach yourself emotionally from the feedback you receive. You need to treat it only as experimental data that you can consider for future work / improvements.

(Also, obligatory reminder that people don't "want" shit. They choose from what's available on the market.)

happy-go-lucky2• 10 years ago

@johnwheeler, good to see you again. How is it coming along?

johnwheeler5• 10 years ago

My latest progress report: https://www.sitepoint.com/how-i-made-2000-in-1-5-months-star...

Trying to get the word out any and every way. Having a blast doing it.

Thanks for asking!

happy-go-lucky2• 10 years ago

Looks like sharing it all has worked its magic. Keep up the good work :)

beamatronic• 10 years ago

This is something I struggled with. I built something that I wanted, but I haven't shared it with anyone yet. I wanted a REST client that would not only allow me to get some data, but then do some simple graphing with it, right in the tool. It's not really packaged up well at this time, but the screen shot gets the idea across.

https://github.com/beamatronic/JsonAnalysisTool

mstodd• 10 years ago

I take the opposite approach. If I share my idea and people say "that's a great idea", I get a feeling of accomplishment even I haven't done anything. It can be tough to actually do the hard work now instead of just coming up with another "great idea" again and being praised for it.

https://sivers.org/zipit

danieltillett• 10 years ago

Care to share some of these great ideas?

rb808• 10 years ago

Sharing takes extra effort.

its more than a little extra effort though. If some library you use yourself takes X effort, cleaning API, making good documentation is 3x, promotion probably means 4x, support brings it to more like 8x especially if popular. Are you sure its worth it?

weaksauce• 10 years ago

What work is worth it to do with 100% certainty? A lot of times these things open up new opportunities even though you might find yourself working on a bust. most times even if it's not valuable from the get go you can always use it when someone asks about your open source contributions or maybe the thing you are working on sparks an idea for another product or gives you some working knowledge of some new library or language that is useful for your next job search.

TeMPOraL10• 10 years ago

But doing that 8x work is a difference between an obscure Github repo and next fad in the JS world.

(You could probably skip making good documentation, everybody does that and it doesn't seem to stop popularity.)

I'd also question making good documentation is 3x the effort - not if your product is really doing anything interesting. For interesting stuff, most work is in the internals and not at the edges that will be documented.

rhizome3• 10 years ago

Documentation is not about functionality, but about maintenance and the Bus Factor.

5ilv3r4• 10 years ago

Where do you share? I'm not on facebook, reddits..... bad now, and all the hacker messageboards I used to frequent are gone (benheck, bacmods, etc).

rawrmaan• 10 years ago

HN, Reddit, Product Hunt. Why is Reddit "bad now", because someone wrote that and now it's your new world view? Reddit is stronger than ever.

5ilv3r4• 10 years ago

Stronger isn't what I'm looking for. If it was, I'd be on facebook. I just want a smaller community with closer interests. More like benheck and bacmods were and less general interest. HN is all business now so it's no good either (for my hacks).

coupdejarnac• 10 years ago

I noticed it is free to post a job now. Is this part of the sharing ethos, and has your business model changed?

leaveyou6• 10 years ago

While I don't mind people sharing their work, I would argue quite the opposite. Make what you want and don't actively share it. Don't waste your time sharing and documenting only to waste even more time maintaining your project if "it becomes successful".

Any programmer worth their salt has a collection of repos

Repos are cool but don't be a programmer. Programmers make programs. You should probably make money. If something is not worth selling, probably is not worth actively sharing & supporting either. Bill Gates is not known for his collection of repos.

Factor in the extra time needed on your projects to tune your work and make it resonate with your audience. Be a prolific sharer.

Yeah, and don't forget to whip yourself regularly.

5ilv3r4• 10 years ago

Does converting microusb cables to OTG dongles by hand count as a good whipping? crack!

mbrock• 10 years ago

"If something is not worth selling, probably is not worth actively sharing & supporting either."

Depends on where you get your motivation and enjoyment.

moron4hire7• 10 years ago

That's a bit like saying "carpenters make furniture. You should probably make money."

Our craft is programming. In order to create unique value where others haven't out of programs, you should probably be good at programming. If the unique value we would create were out of design, we'd be designers. If it were out of reports, we'd be statisticians. Know your craft and be good at it.

leaveyou6• 10 years ago

I bet there are a lot less carpenters "worth their salt" giving away their designs and "sharing" furniture for free than programmers. Still, if you want and afford to profess for fame and good will, do it..

TeMPOraL10• 10 years ago

Yeah, and don't forget to whip yourself regularly.

Interesting in the context of "Programmers make programs. You should probably make money."

Last time I checked, (the need of) making money was the whip ensuring people produce stuff. As a society, we put up with most people routinly producing the worst possible crap they can get away with, while inventing new creative ways to take more money for it, only because it ensures enough stuff gets produced for everyone to go around.

If something is not worth selling, probably is not worth actively sharing & supporting either.

I beg to disagree. A lot of well-selling products today should not even exist. Marketing has much better ROI than delivering something of value. OTOH, a lot of things that absolutely should be supported and rewared isn't. Think about infrastructure, or people like paramedics.

But hey, maybe that's why I'm poor - I consider making money as an unpleasant necessity instead of end goal.

20years• 10 years ago

Repos are cool but don't be a programmer. Programmers make programs. You should probably make money

This is an interesting point. I like to think of myself as a business owner/entrepreneur who programs. Programming is such a small part of what I do.

Of course if you want to be a Programmer, there is nothing wrong with that. Some people don't want to have to worry about biz dev or all of the other stuff and just want to code/create/build.

fiatjaf2• 10 years ago

People are already sharing a lot, we need more curation. HN is great for that, but still a lot of crap emerges and awesome stuff is ignored, so people have to post multiple times and so on.

There are also a lot of paid sharing sites, which means something is very wrong.

Quiark• 10 years ago

Yes, I think there is definitely value in hand-curated lists. Just look at the popularity of the awesome-XYZ repos on github

fiatjaf2• 10 years ago

Despite some of the famoust ones being of great utility, most Awesome-XYZ lists are just "everything that mentions this topic slightly", and so there needs to be better curation there too. Or perhaps a curation of Awesome-XYZ lists.

jklinger410• 10 years ago

If the problem is worth solving, from a monetary standpoint, then sharing is actually more important than building.

I know that's heresy here on hacker news but I am an internet marketer and I have not seen the "if you build it they will come" mentality work very often.

In most cases it's "if they want it you should build it."

cableshaft• 10 years ago

I once worked for a client that was so certain they were going to get millions of users within three weeks of launching their mobile app with nothing more than about $100 in Facebook ads marketing.

That didn't work out too well for him.

I also don't agree with the 'Field of Dreams' marketing strategy. I've seen it fail too many times.

jsprogrammer• 10 years ago

Doesn't "If they want it you should build it" already assume "if you build it they will come"?

If you don't think they will come, why are you doing it?

jacobolus• 10 years ago

The key point here is that you need to have contact/communication with the “they” (either they already contacted you, or you need to put a lot of work into marketing to them). Otherwise “they” are going to ignore you.

douche• 10 years ago

Because somebody has offered you a fat stack of cash to do it?

My company does all kinds of shit that we wouldn't necessarily ever think to do if we were dogfooding it for ourselves, but customers have requests, and once in a while, they're even good ideas that are worth building into the product. The best is when they agree to pay extra for that custom development.

icebraining3• 10 years ago

I know that's heresy here on hacker news

I don't think we're visiting the same HN.

pascalxus• 10 years ago

This is a good point, especially about getting over your own ego and fear of rejection. I've shared your post on my twitter. And, btw, if your looking to find others to share with on Twitter, try out http://www.find70.com/?t=ha It's the most advanced Twitter Profile Search.

jamestimmins2• 10 years ago

What subreddits are good places to share on Reddit? I'd love to get feedback on small projects, but things that are definitely not polished/planned out enough to warrant posting on Product Hunt. I find that feedback is most helpful in the "simple little tool" phase.

overcast3• 10 years ago

Click on that little 'Show' link at the top of your screen.

jamestimmins2• 10 years ago

Hah thanks! I've never noticed that before.

dbla• 10 years ago

I always go for the product specific subreddits. Right now I'm working on a fitness tracker for rock climbers, so I picked r/climbing and r/bouldering. So I think it depends on what you're trying to share.

loader• 10 years ago

If it's a web based project /r/internetisbeautiful can get you a lot of exposure.

rocky1138• 10 years ago

I launched my HTC Vive game just under two weeks ago and /r/vive has been tremendous in supporting me with feedback and kind words.

I'm no expert but based on my experience going right to the people who will be using your product works wonders. It helps the ego when it's something they like. If you get ignored, try one more time then abandon the project.

johnwheeler5• 10 years ago

/r/startups

/r/entrepreneur

/r/technology

/r/learnpython

/r/learnprogramming

/r/programming/

even small ones like /r/blogging /r/coolgithubprojects

HillaryBriss• 10 years ago

If you’re a big picture person unwilling to grind out the gritty details on your project, you might as well just forget the whole damn thing — no one is going to stick around if you don’t.

yes. in a corporate context, i've see this same thing happen in a research group which was very "vision driven."

the prevailing belief (at the top) was that the group could just implement a bare bones, buggy, semi-documented version of the visionary's idea and simply "hand off" the whole project to another group which could then "realize value" from it.

but it never worked out that way.

the receiving groups didn't want to spend the time learning about it, setting it up, working around bugs and deficiencies and asking the research group questions about their vision-implementation.

in short, the receiving groups never believed in the vision group's implementation enough to invest their time and attention.

fillskills2• 10 years ago

Sharing is so hard. Fear of criticism is so high. Being open and even looking up for critical criticism is important for a product to evolve. Even the iPhone opened up to apps on feedback at launch.

Posts like these are very crucial to help people like me get over that bump.

I have to say also that I am in love with the website oldgeekjobs. Its so well done.

johnwheeler5• 10 years ago

Thank you! I'm trying to keep it loading under 300ms--speed and simplicity as features.

I love that you say you're in love with it.

adamqureshi• 10 years ago

This client asked me to build a job board. I was thinking of using a theme. BUT dang when i saw the UI for OGJ i was curious, would you opensource the Front end? They are in the UK niche market. Figured i'd ask. ;-)

fillskills2• 10 years ago

Sure, I just sent three friends the link. Hope they get jobs using the site.

dfabulich• 10 years ago

I don't get it. Reddit explicitly forbids self-promotion. https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion

I understand their policies, but I'm running a business. I have time enough to share my work on Reddit, but I don't have time to be an active contributor to Reddit, submitting links from a variety of sources, just so I can occasionally post my own links and get no clicks on them.

The only self-promomtion alternative is posting a sponsored headline. Doing that every time I want to share my own stuff is just throwing away money.

pjlegato4• 10 years ago

Moreover, most people either run ad blockers that hide the sponsored headlines, or else have simply learned to ignore them as they scan the page visually.

I believe what OP is doing -- what all successful self-promoters on Reddit do -- is ignore the "no self-promotion" policy, but avoid getting punished for it by posting on very niche subreddits where a significant percentage of people are actually interested in the product and so "upvote" rather than "report".

mattthebaker• 10 years ago

Reddit is owned by a mass media conglomerate. A significant portion of everything on the site is native advertising. Self promotion would interfere with what they are really pushing and undermine their influence. The smaller communities exist as goodwill to make the high traffic portions seem more authentic.

Using sponsored headlines makes you look even worse than posting unfortunately. You have to be an insider to get the native placement I guess.

Just watch for the next big hollywood movie to come out and random disguised content x to magically bubble up and plaster the front page.

anondon• 10 years ago

The smaller communities exist as goodwill to make the high traffic portions seem more authentic.

What makes you think smaller communities exist out of goodwill? People are allowed to create subreddits, and whoever is interested joins the subreddit and engages (or just lurks). It has nothing to do with goodwill. It's fascinating how you spun your narrative to make it seem like "Reddit is owned by a mass media conglomerate" is an evil thing.

guynamedloren• 10 years ago

The only self-promomtion alternative is posting a sponsored headline

How about engaging?

Your bio says you produce "text-based interactive novels". While this is something I have no expertise in, I'm sure there is an active and engaged community on Reddit, at least in some form. You likely have plenty of first-hand experience on the subject if you are a producer yourself, so perhaps the community would appreciate you sharing some of that knowledge and experience: anecdotes you've picked up along the way, what works, what doesn't work, etc. Maybe even some feedback on the work of others. A little generosity goes a long way.

A great example is bandholz (beardbrand) in the beard product space (/r/beards and more).

arbuge• 10 years ago

It seems what the author is actually recommding goes beyond just sharing and is actually open sourcing a project's code.

Not saying that's necessarily a bad idea, but on the other hand I'm not sure it's always guaranteed to be the best course of action either.

I do endorse the viewpoint of sharing updates on a project's progress with the intended audience as often as possible, including when those updates could sometimes be rather minor.

mezod• 10 years ago

This was a well timed reading for me. Been battling with showing an idea in the last 2 months and the interest has been minimal. People will say it's great and won't even sign up. I guess everyone is too busy with their life.

Is at this point where you keep reconsidering if this project is worth the time you've put in it, and you might have to put in it. So, don't concede.

rhizome3• 10 years ago

I'm in a similar position, working on an app idea that I've decided to open-source. If it catches on I can create a hosting service for it.

mattbgates• 10 years ago

I actually have the philosophy: "Build it for yourself, share with others." Everything I have done, I have always just built it because I have needed it and found use for it. I have then shared it with others. In a way, it is totally selfish, but I'm not disappointed if no one uses it because I use it! Why waste my time developing something I would never use? If other people use it, great! If not, I still find it useful! My first PHP project showed me this philosophy was true and fortunately, hundreds of people are actually using it. https://mypost.io/

RachelF• 10 years ago

Very true - building a great product is only half the story. You also have to market it, something us geeks are normally not that good at.

Part of the reason for Linux's failure on the desktop is that is lacks salesmen to push it.

patrickyeon• 10 years ago

If your posts don’t get traction, HackerNews allows a small number of reposts spaced out over time — you’re not spamming (so long as you’re not spamming).

Interesting to watch. This article has been posted by the same user twice already in the last week, with a different title, and got no traction either time. It's hard sometimes to figure out when what you're offering isn't wanted, and when you just hit the perfect storm that stopped you from getting the attention you deserve.

I'm not calling johnwheeler out on this, clearly he's eventually hit the right nerve. But, well, it's a line to walk: taking the hint that some content doesn't resonate with an audience vs. needing the effort to make them realize it should resonate.

prawn• 10 years ago

I posted it also and it went nowhere. Not being in the US, I find timezones can work against stories I think are interesting and post.

kenrick95• 10 years ago

In short: "Do things, tell people"

http://carl.flax.ie/dothingstellpeople.html

tones411• 10 years ago

What happens if you share it, but haven't built it, and don't have very much time to build it, but someone else does, and they like the idea and build it first?

bashinator• 10 years ago

Hopefully you helped them out enough to be a principal stakeholder.

Axsuul• 10 years ago

This rarely happens. It's a moot point. Potential customers are 99.9% of the time too busy or don't have the resources to execute on a solution.

ilaksh• 10 years ago

I share quite a bit of what I make or think. It almost always is rewarded with indifference or mild to extreme hostility. The best I can hope for if I am lucky is a tepid level of upvotes (perhaps one or two dozen) and maybe one comment.

But I continue to post links and comments on reddit and Hacker News no matter how much hate or indifference I receive. Sometimes I doubt that I should bother. But I do anyway.

golergka• 10 years ago

It makes a lot of sense. However, being a proficient software engineer is correlated with being introverted, and for an introvert it's much easier and more enjoyable to tinker and build something in solitude than sharing it with others. So, even while sharing itself would take only five minutes vs a few hours to implement another feature, it often requires much more effort and energy.

Making what people want isn’t enough, you have to share it

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