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Yep I'm sympathetic to your post. As for the counterargument, I have two rebuttals:
1. I would agree if we were talking about e.g. money-limited people donating small token amounts to effective charities to build their identities, but "one who limits personal carbon footprint outside of a strategy to stop global warming" isn't even an identity people should want :)
2. Even if we give up on talking about strong causal mechanisms and just talk about weak effects of one's carbon-footprint-reduction efforts like "raising awareness of the issue", there's also the self-licensing effect where people are satisfied to think of themselves as a good person after just taking one or two actions, so actions that don't help can drive out actions that would have helped.
Awesome, I think the Western world currently has a shortage of specific ambitious proposals like this. Strong upvote.
In Zero to One, Peter Thiel calls this "definite future" mindset and specifically mentions the Reber Plan as an example.
I think many of the people who were commenting in your threads would have been up to let you interview them in a video chat if you’d DM’d them at the time. I don’t think it should take more than 10 DMs to get a video interview with this kind of approach.
Can you link to specific posts you've made in relevant communities for poker and/or startups asking for feedback or discussion about your ideas? If they get 1k+ views then I'd expect at least one or two leads to come out of such a post.
Well it's not surprising that someone on a forum who said they love your app weeks or months ago is probably not super likely to respond to a DM now. There's just a general level of flakiness that suits all of us to partake in to some degree.
How about DMing 10 users who have commented in the poker reddit in the last 48 hours and asking if they'd do you a favor and answer questions about their poker interest on a video call? I bet you'd get a couple takers. Until I understand why your specific situation is best helped by an email list of early adopters, I'm skeptical that your value prop generalizes the way you think it does.
With the poker app, I found that the poker subreddit, other poker forums, in person networking, and cold emails didn't amount to enough leads.
[...] I think the success of this platform idea we're talking about depends a good amount on the answer to that question, because if founders are currently doing fine with customer outreach, then it wouldn't really be solving a problem for them.
No question that acquiring leads/customers is a huge problem for a huge number of businesses. Google and Facebook are worth a combined $trillion because they sell a solution to that problem.
I just don't think an "email list of early adopters" would have helped you acquire leads more than you can already help yourself by using existing forums that aggregate poker-lovers plus existing forums that aggregate people who are open to testing startups.
You probably think whoever currently follows Product Hunt is a good candidate to be on your email list, if only Product Hunt had a section for pre-launch companies. Well, it's not hard to look up 100 PH users' emails and blast them an email to take a look at your poker bot :) you can target PH people who have liked poker-related products. This would constitute an MVP of testing your idea, even though on the surface you might not imagine it as such.
But my impression is that a) many founders struggle to get in touch with these sorts of early adopters, and b) even if they are successfully getting in touch with some, they'd still want more. Of course, this is a hypothesis that could be validated without actually building anything, eg. by talking to founders.
Before talking to other founders, a good first step is to convince yourself you would be a passionate user of this, which I'm skeptical about. E.g. would you pay $50/month for access? (This $50 threshold is a generally-applicable stronger version of the Value Prop Story test.)
Good point about everyone needing to have backup plans for power outages.
Another observation is: It’s crazy that few people were aware that an outage would be happening with elevated probability until the day of. It probably would have avoided $1B in marginal lost productivity to have proper communication.
What do you think? I lean slightly towards thinking that you disagree, because you initially said that founders shouldn't worry too much about market size. If so, what is the thought process behind that? Because you think there's a route to "grow the pie" for any product? Because at an early stage your goal is to be nimble and figure out what direction to run in?
It's good to think about the market and where you can grow it. Paul Graham asks "What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?" If you can tap into early passionate users and an exponential growth rate of revenue (or at least usage), and the business is inherently scalable (i.e. not a local diner), then it's hard to be confident that the growth rate will slam into a wall in the near future, but it's also then quick to test whether you can keep the exponential curve going or not. So the question of whether the idea is good approximately reduces to the question of whether you can get a traction and growth curve going, and that's usually the highest priority thing to focus on proving. Sometimes you might convince yourself that the market has very little potential even if you do get early passionate users with a good early growth rate, but it's a rare outcome and often worth giving it a shot and following where it goes.
Huh. I thought it would be the opposite. That people have egos that are too big and they think they're more important than they actually are. Or are you saying that I personally don't have a big ego, because I'm having this conversation?
Salespeople typically deal with flakiness and rejection all day. A big part of their job is to relentlessly hound their prospects. I did some sales outreach the other day trying to get affiliate partnerships and it doesn't feel good to be reaching out to a bunch of people and getting ignored and turned down. But on the other side of the table, when salespeople pester me, I may be slightly annoyed at the spam but I understand they're playing a game and I don't hate them for it.
Re the "early adopters email list" idea:
Try making the Value Prop Story more specific by identifying an actual specific person on one or both sides of the 2-sided business, and explain why specifically they need a new email list beyond what exists now.
Are you specifically an example of the "early adopter" you have in mind? Am I an early adopter? I don't know because that's a vague term. I'm curious to skim descriptions of e.g. a cool new database, but not happy to adopt it. I'm unlikely to early-adopt a new beauty product.
I'm guessing that you launching your poker software is an example of a target user on the looking-for-early-adopter-feedback side of the equation. Is "email list for early adopters" really that big of a win for what you needed? It seems like the Poker subreddit and other poker communities should already have had enough leads you could email about testing your product.
Your original Value Prop Story should probably already about the kind of person you have access to in your life, depending on what field you're working on, so I'm skeptical that what founders really need is an email list of early adopters. And if they do just need that, there's already Product Hunt, Hacker News, startups reddit, startupschool.org, nugget.one, tons of incubators/accelerators who offer advising, usertesting.com, etc.
You can always chart a path that maximizes your rate of validated learning / de-risking your biggest risks. Like if you’re building something huge, build the most uncertain parts first. Yes sometimes a project is inherently slow and capital-intensive but that’s rare and most people who think their startup is that exception are actually just being sucked into the most common fatal attractor.
Whenever I ask any employee or contractor to do a project, I always say show me the first half-baked sign of progress after 1 day of work. I never want someone to do a bunch of work on a project that has any kind of risk without a quick feedback loop. I try my best to avoid trusting that it’ll all work out sometime later.
That makes sense, but only if you have a plausible path to growing the size of the market.
I can imagine that someone could make poker software that makes poker more fun and addictive, pulling more people into learning to play well who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered. Peloton got regular people interested in indoor cycling. Codecademy got regular people learning to code. It’s possible to demonstrate signs of this potential just by having passionate early users and a sturdy growth rate starting from a small baseline.
And [grabbing specific people and manually stuffing value into them] seems like a really important thing for founders to understand.
Ya my whole blog bloatedmvp.com is about founders not understanding this.
It makes me feel really uneasy though, because I don't want to be spammy. What are your thoughts on that?
- Your own ego will already bias you toward not putting yourself out there enough.
- People and companies have robust spam defenses/habits already built up from more powerful spammers than you’ll ever be. For example, they habitually ignore plenty of messages and emails they get.
Also, when you narrow down what your MVP is to the point where it’s almost by definition an incremental improvement in one specific person’s life, you should feel more confident to attempt to do a Collison Installation on that person. If it doesn’t work out, they should be able to understand why you were convinced this would be worth their time, even if you were wrong.
BTW, one of my unfleshed ideas is to have a platform that connects self-proclaimed early adopters with early stage founders. Maybe the early adopters would get access to products discounts or something for being on the platform, and early stage founders would have to pay to be on the platform. I plan on fleshing this out and writing about it some time in the future. It easily could turn out to be a bad idea; just thought I'd mention it.
I dunno, try giving a specific value prop story (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iMQmfgieRKY62MC3z/the-power-to-judge-startup-ideas) illustrating why it’s much better than Product Hunt.
http://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html
Tons of amazingly insightful points packed into a small essay. I was paraphrasing the “Vector” section.
Another good concept from that post is the “Collison Installation”. I also like to call it manhandling your traction.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries explains “MVP” as a broader concept of a tool to obtain validated learning. Getting traction is a special case of learning for companies whose most pressing question is whether people really want what they’re building. This special case encompasses most startups. But SpaceX had less doubt about demand for wildly cheaper launches and more doubt about technical feasibility, so an engine test firing was a kind of MVP for them.
Re poker pros not understanding the ROI of your software:
When you build a better tool/platform but people/companies refuse to use it, you can often just use your own tool to compete with them at their business. In this case that would mean training yourself to kick their ass at poker.
If your tool can’t let you do that, maybe find an up & coming poker star who you set up with your tool and you could somehow invest in the upside of their winnings.
More evidence that it takes a lot to actually get people to look in your direction, and that customer acquisition is hard.
People are lazy and irrational
Yes, we all are to some degree. For example, I was a self taught pianist for 15 years before I finally got rational enough to hire a piano teacher because I predicted it would vastly increase my learning rate, and sure enough there was a ton of low hanging fruit I learned. It’s just that seeking and hiring the teacher had friction/hassle and risk of not working out, so didn’t feel appealing.
How about this for affiliate outreach:
- Email some hard core online poker players and ask if you can get on a video call to ask their advice about poker software you’re building.
- On the call, ask them to show you their workflow how they play online with helper software open.
- Then show them your software and specifically show what it would look like in their exact scenario, and get their thoughts.
I’m not sure your software is used during an online game like that, but my point is you want to really spoon feed them into realizing the value of your software to get them to actually care about it and use it.
They [Y Combinator] talk a lot about focusing heavily on the product, as opposed to marketing it. I at least get the impression from them that making something people want is what it's all about, and that if you manage to do so, you'll have success.
Well, it’s an important fact that most startups fail by not making something people want, so “make something people want” is the best 4-word advice, but you also need a customer acquisition mechanism and it can be fatal if you can’t find one.
In fact I think difficulty with customer acquisition, i.e. customer acquisition costs tanking the business’s unit economics, is the second biggest startup killer after not making something people want.
Paul Graham made the point that these days when you want to judge a startup idea, you’re actually judging the idea pair (what you’re doing that people want, how you acquire customers).
If the top bestselling poker book sold 100k copies total, that might be 10k copies/yr, meaning the book’s profits are under $100k/yr and the author’s cut is less.
The Poker subreddit only has 100k subscribers, and it’s a much bigger commitment for people to buy poker software than read a subreddit. So it seems plausible that the total market is only 1k users, but you never know.
Founders shouldn’t worry too much about market size, just focus on getting early users and growing the user base at some rate like 10%/month. For example, Uber has grown beyond the total market size of taxis. Peloton has grown beyond what many people might have guessed was the market size of people who want a home exercise bike. Microsoft’s original market was BASIC programmers.
To be able to direct your effort toward where it will make a difference, you need to get a feedback loop going where you give people value and observe the consequences. You made a quality piece of software that could give people value in theory, but in practice value usually can’t be transmitted without an intense manual effort at sales/delivery/onboarding. The way to give people value is to grab specific people and manually stuff your value into them.
Most startups have to manually hunt down their initial traction one customer at a time. It almost always takes a long time to get momentum going where you don’t have to spend manual effort and resources to acquire the next incremental customer.
SpaceX’s goal is “settle Mars”, its MVP was “build a low-earth orbit launch system”, and sub-MVPs of that (experiments to validate the highest-uncertainty thing they needed to validate) consisted of things like engine test firings.
Sure feel free to DM.
In my mind at the time, the "specific people" part was already validated due to the fact that hundreds of thousands of people use Flopzilla and similar apps, or so I thought.
"Person who uses Flopzilla" isn't maximally specific, compared to knowing their name and talking to them :)
This is a great authentic diary of a certain type of smart startup founder's experience. I'm sure there have been dozens of other founders who have similar stories and never wrote them up like this.
But I really question whether the lean startup applies to this particular scenario. I know you want to avoid wasting time building things that people don't actually want. That's like the biggest startup sin there is. I know. But like, what am I supposed to do?
Yep, that's the internal monologue of most founders. The siren song is "Surely I can't put this in front of users this week". You have to be Odysseus ignoring the sirens.
My hypothesis is that once my app gets to the point where it's in the ballpark of Flopzilla or better, that people will want to use it. It takes time to get to that point. There isn't really a quick two week MVP I could build to test that hypothesis. I'm already trying to avoid building non-essential features, and focus on getting to that point as quickly as possible. So what am I supposed to do?
The goal is to validate that specific people exist who have a need for what you're building. But the "specific people" part of that sentence is more important than the "what you're building" part. Identify them now and talk to them, then ask yourself what is the minimal thing you can do to get them engaged with your product/service.
When you scope a product for only one specific workflow of one specific person, it can be much leaner than what you otherwise would have built as an MVP.
Re needing to be better than Flopzilla: If a specific target user is currently using Flopzilla, how about a workflow where they keep Flopzilla open but also your product at the same time, and they pull up your product in a few narrow situations where it's differentiated from Flopzilla? It'll be a janky experience, and that's fine. It should be possible to get a few specific users using something janky like that as your initial validation.
Yeah nice
Thanks for doing this! It was a cool unique experience, and good for community-bonding all us LWers.
In particular I got seriously stuck with "blizzard is -$100". This is a pretty alien way to express things to me. [...] Now I am tangled with problems with the auxillary tools and the point is obscured. [...] If we stayed at more abstract level then my disagremeent on the details would not similarly interfere.
But if you're stuck on how to model driving through the blizzard as having a utility-value of -$100, it means that you would have been stuck on any explanation of "avoid the sunk-cost fallacy" until you understand how that kind of utility-scoring works.
So the specific example was superior to the general statement in revealing where the remaining hole in your understanding is.
Now you can patch the hole yourself by looking up utility-scoring. Alternately, I could have anticipated that not all readers would know about utility-scoring, and explained that in an "earlier chapter", but it doesn't fundamentally undermine the value of specificity and mind-anchors to teach concepts better.
Hmm I actually think there might be a psychologically optimal idea close to this.
Let’s say you expect to earn $200k/yr for the next 10 years and you want to donate 10% of your income to charity, which is $20k/yr over 10 years, which has a net present value of about $100k. Sell someone an Income Share Agreement (ISA) for $100k which you donate now, then pay the ISA 10% of your income for 10 years.
This could be, like you say, a good commitment mechanism for your present self to get the upper hand over your future self. The ISA protects the downside risk of having a loan you can’t pay if your income unexpectedly decreases.
Yeah I know what you mean. I think in most cases, even for startup ideas, this might be a good template:
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Extremely brief abstract statement - the YC application actually starts by asking “describe your startup in 50 characters or less” before asking “what is your startup going to make?” And I bet Paul Graham reads that first!
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Concrete example as mind-anchor
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Abstract claims
As others have pointed out, #1 can be something of a “motivation-anchor” for caring about #2 because you want to know where the example is going before you start listening to it.
1+2 together are a mental-model “boot loader” for #3. And I think it’s important for #1 not to tax working memory so it can be free to focus mostly on #2.
Nice ya anchor seems like a better image than hanger, and Paul Graham could have just as easily written “something to anchor my mind on”.
Thanks! I’m definitely open to calling it something other than “mind-hanger”. I called it that because I’ve never seen anyone call it anything except Paul Graham writing “something to hang the application on in my mind”.
Here’s what I think a mind-hanger (or other term X) refers to: before you can build a new structure in your mind that you can expect to remember and reason about, you need to start by thinking about mind-hangers/X’s that are already well-established in your web of preexisting knowledge and intuitions.
I think I also realized another specificity-angle to this (in addition to “specifics are good mind-hangers”):
When you endeavor to teach someone a concept, you want them to come away with that concept connected to their preexisting knowledge and intuitions. Ok, which specific preexisting knowledge and intuitions? Don’t rely on the person to hang your lessons in some unspecified way. Pick a specific mind-hanger and surgically install your lesson on it.
In the "Teach With Examples First" section, I make Gowers's point that sliding down the ladder of abstraction is a good source of universal mind-hangers.
I'm not seeing much difference in 'definitedness' between personal behavior change and "world organization that sets per-country targets" unless it's just that solving global warming necessarily must involve global government.
Yes, I think some minimal level of global coordination may be necessary, and is very likely to play a significant causal role in the eventual outcome. For example, I think the US should feel more comfortable investing in a certain amount of carbon emissions reduction/sequestration knowing that other countries are officially supposed to also do their part.
In contrast, whether individuals focus any effort on reducing their footprint outside of their main system of economic incentives is definitely not going to have a causal role on the outcome.
But the set of hypotheses "X does not exist" doesn't contain both sides of the isomorphism, so the obvious argument doesn't carry through.
I figured anyone who thinks proving non-existence is extra hard also probably lacks a sufficiently thought-out concept of "existence" to convincingly make that claim :)
But ok, to engage more with the parent: My atheism takes the form "For all God-concepts I've heard of, my attempt to make them specific has either yielded something wrong like Helios, or meaningless like belief-in-belief or perhaps a bad word choice like 'God is probability'".
If the set of all God-concepts I've heard were empty, I wouldn't have the need to say I'm an atheist. That's why the burden of proof is actually on the God-concept-proposers.
Hey lionhearted, thanks for your kind words!
This is just kinda "ah, thank you, this is valuable — but you know, you're like 95% correct, you're just missing ________" — what's the blank line there?
Hm, colleges and lectures have various justifications for existing that are valid 5% of the time, that seems obvious enough, even if I didn't acknowledge it in the post... I guess I'll try to privately puzzle out your intended subtext.
^ The Power to Compliment Effectively
Thanks, appreciate it!
I'd refer you to https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Highly_Advanced_Epistemology_101_for_Beginners
I define "grounding" in How Specificity Works
I did give a valid grounding of "space".
I don't think that's an accurate characterization of grounding
You're having Stephanie admit to dialogue-Liron's claim that she possesses mere belief-in-belief, i.e. her term "God" isn't grounded in anything outside of her own mind.
Ahhh right, you got me, I was unnecessarily political! It didn't pattern match to the kind of political arguing that I see in my bubble, but I get why anyone who feels skeptical or unhappy about Uber's practices won't be maximally receptive to learning about specificity using this example, and why even people who don't have an opinion about Uber have expressed feeling "uncomfortable" with the example. Thanks!
At some point I may go back and replace with another example. I'm open to ideas.
Thanks for trying my "write one more line of the dialogue" challenge. I think that our two attempts are quite different and sufficiently illustrate my point.
Stephanie suffers from belief-in-belief (which she wrongly thinks is just an ordinary belief with an external referent) and I don't
Yes "a warm fuzzy feeling triggered by me thinking of the word 'God'" could be a valid grounding of "God"; in fact Stephanie's character probably might ground it that way, since she's intentionally written as a character who merely possesses belief in belief in God.
This post focuses on greenhouse gas concentrations. Since the causal model is (greenhouse gas concentrations) -> (temperature plus the other stuff you mention), I figure the highest-leverage way to solve climate change is to lower greenhouse gas concentrations.
Proving something does not exist is a highly problematic exercise.
No, for any hypothesis H, it's on average equally "problematic" to believe its probability is 1% as it is to believe its probability is 99%.
Thanks
All I asked Stephanie to do is ground her term "God". Terms like "space" are easily groundable in hundreds of ways.
For example for "space": I can use my eyes to estimate the distance between people standing in a field. If the people then seem to be trying their hardest to run toward each other, I expect to observe a minimum amount of time before I'll see their distances hit near-zero, proportional to the distance apart they are.
If tomorrow there were no space, one way I could distinguish that alternate reality from current reality is by observing the above grounding getting falsified.
>> I don't even know where to begin imagining what a lack of objective reality looks like
Well. Now you have stumbled upon another standard fallacy, argument from the failure of imagination. If you look up various non-realist epistemologies, it could be a good start.
Of course, I wasn't trying to argue the claim, I was just reporting my experience.
Placebo effects area a real thing. If one truly takes Bob's grounding then it is not obvious that it is factually incorrect. If "dark matter" means "whatever causes this expansion" then "whatever causes this healing" probably hits a whole bunch of aspects of reality.
But if we're being honest with each other, we both know that Bob's grounding is factually incorrect, right? It's not trivial to lay out the justification for this knowledge that we both possess, it requires training in epistemology and Occam's razor. But a helpful intuition pump is Marshall Brain's question: Why won't God heal amputees? This kind of thought experiment shows the placebo effect to be a better hypothesis than Bob's God.
In your example of an unfairly-written dialogue, when Slider says at the end "Seems contradictory and crazy", it feels like the most unfair part is when you don't let Aaron respond one more time. I think the single next line of dialogue would be very revealing:
Aaron: Here's a precise mathematical definition of "wave" that I think you'll agree is coherent and even intuitive, but doesn't have any "medium". Light waves are similarly mathematical objects that we can call waves without reference to a medium. Where's the contradiction in that?
If you think that I have written a dialogue where you can add just one line of dialogue to make a big difference to the reader's takeaway, feel free to demonstrate it, because I consider this to be a sign of an unfairly-written dialogue.
You claim that my questions to Stephanie were overly vague, but if that were the case, then Stephanie could simply say "The way your questions are constructed seems vague and confusing to me. I'm confused what you're specifically trying to ask me." But that wouldn't fit in the dialogue because my questions weren't the source of vagueness; Stephanie's confusion was the source of vagueness.
The patience of discussion-liron runs out pretty fast and is likely because of preconceptions that "higher purpose" is likely to be empty.
I purposely designed a dialogue where Stephanie really is pure belief-in-belief. I think this accurately represents most people in these kinds of discussions. I could write a longer dialogue where I give Stephanie more opportunity to have subtle coherent beliefs reveal themselves, but given who her character is, they won't.
In your analogy with a dialogue about Stephanie-the-many-worlds-believer, I would expect Stephanie to sharply steer the discussion in the direction of Occam's razor and epistemology, if she knew what she was talking about. Similarly, she could have sharply steered somewhere if she had a coherent meaning about believing in God beyond trivial belief-in-belief.
I would like to see shminux challenge addressed here.
Sure, see that thread.
Let's pick another faith based case -- or even the atheist position (which I would argue is just as much about faith as the religious persons). I agree with the position that rationality leads not to no belief (in god or some other position) but an agnostic position.
Ok, I think you're asking me to ground my atheism-belief, like why am I not agnostic?
Since I don't think that you think I should be agnostic about e.g. Helios, I would ask you to first clarify your question by putting forth a specific hypothesis that you think I should be agnostic rather than atheist about.
If you want an example, I've pointed out multiple times that privileging the model of objective reality (the map/territory distinction) over other models is one of those ubiquitous beliefs.
Ya I was hoping for an example, thanks :)
Now that you have read this sentence, pause for a moment and notice your emotions about it. Really, take a few seconds. List them.
My first emotion was "Come on, you want to challenge objective reality? That's a quality belief that's table stakes for almost all productive discussions we can have!"
Then I thought, "Okay fine, no problem, I'm mature and introspective enough to do this rationality exercise, I don't want to be a hypocrite to change others' minds about religion without allowing my own mind to be changed by the same sound methods, plus anyway this community will probably love me if I do by chance have a big fundamental mind change on this topic, so I don't care much if I do or not, although it'll become a more time-consuming exercise to have such an epiphany."
Then I thought, "Okay but I don't even know where to begin imagining what a lack of objective reality looks like, it just feels like confusion, similar to when I try to imagine e.g. a non-reductionist universe with ontologically fundamental mental entities."
Now compare it with the emotions a devout person would feel when told that God is just a belief. If you are honest with yourself, then you are likely to admit that there is little difference. ... So, if you have never demolished your own deeply held belief, and went through the emotional anguish of reframing your views unflinchingly, you are not qualified to advise others how to do it.
For my first emotion, sure, there's little difference in the reaction between me and a God-believer. But for my subsequent introspection, I think I'm doing better and being more rational than most God-believers. That's why I consider myself a pretty skilled rationalist! Perhaps I have something to show for spending thousands of hours reading LW posts?
I think I have the power to have crises of faith. FWIW, I realized I personally do "believe in God" in the sense that I believe Bostrom's Simulation Hypothesis has more than a 50% chance of being true, and it's a serviceable grounding of the term "God" to refer to an intelligence running the simulation - although it may just be alien teenagers or something, so I certainly don't like bringing in the connotations of the word "God", but it's something right?