Not that I disagree with anything said, but it is really easy to put your head down and build good products that eventually fail because no one knew about them. Just a thought.
The counter to this is that good products are - by virtue of being good - products that people use and talk about. Generating hype can accelerate awareness and growth, but only after the product is proven to be good via initial organic growth.
> The counter to this is that good products are - by virtue of being good - products that people use and talk about.
This is so insanely untrue. There are tons of great products that don't see the light of day because the people in charge of said product don't have the skill set to find the people that would be interested in them.
Historically that may have been true (if you consider making a product usable and finding users for it distinct from the task of making a product good), but the trend is very much in the opposite direction.
These days the difficulty in building a great product vastly outweighs the difficulty in finding an audience to validate it. Both skills can - and must - be learned, but these days, someone who is able to learn how to build a great product will find it comparatively easy to learn how to find an early-adopter audience for it.
This is what YC is talking about with their motto "make something people want".
I agree. How many times have you heard of a Google product only after it was announced that were shuttering the service? If Google has this problem, how many other businesses rise and fall without others knowing?
Hype can just as easily destroy a product by setting expectations too high and the product doesn't deliver. Think of how many movies have fallen into this trap?
You have to strike the perfect balance of sparking just enough interest while still delivering something of interest.
Not that I disagree with anything said, but it is really easy to put your head down and build good products that eventually fail because no one knew about them. Just a thought.