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The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn (2006)

http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html

by staunch • 15 years ago

3 1 15 years ago

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colintan• 15 years ago

Quite possibly the most important paragraph in this essay for a product at the customer dev stage (and probably easy to underestimate... it's a very subtle point):

"There are two things you have to do to make people pause. The most important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell your site is about. How often have you visited a site that seemed to assume you already knew what they did?"

It's hard to attain the perspective of a completely fresh user when you've been in the trenches hacking away for so long. And as I've discovered, if you can't explain it, you can't sell it, cos no one landing on your site's gonna pore over the genius invisibly possessing it like a ghost in the machine.

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