Founders need to be asked those questions. Those are important questions, that the founders should be asking themselves, but also are going to have gaps in asking themselves. The same enthusiasm that causes them to want to work on these problems also causes them to miss vital questions.
Be mindful when asking that type of question. Not every founder needs to hear every question from you. But if they come to you for council, do ask those questions, because a ton of them they'd better have immediate answers to, and the rest they probably should have thought of already. But one of the most valuable services you can provide, as a friend, is to be a sounding board and to make certain they have iterated across all of those questions. That does mean a substantial mental investment from you in maintaining that checklist.
You're correct that it requires thick skin, but there is such thing as pushing too hard, and I've dealt with that personally when a close friend became almost aggressive in their viewpoint.
Could not disagree more. If your plan is to build a search engine and you _can't_ answer such a basic question as "why would someone use your engine over Google," then your plan is going to fail.
If you're a founder you should anticipate these kinds of questions and have answers for them that make sense; if you ask these kinds of questions you should expect an actual answer, even if you don't agree with it.
Edit, to hopefully avoid some predictable replies:
- If the point is "don't be a jerk" then fine, there's a way to ask these basic questions without being discouraging.
- The author is right if the project isn't supposed to be a business. "Why would someone use your hobby language instead of C++" is a stupid question because the point of writing a hobby language is the fun of writing it.
But if someone is putting their life savings into a business idea and can't answer the most basic questions about it... Maybe they need a little discouragement.
Edit, again:
Also, I'm not a founder, but I have a side project, and I've gotten these sorts of questions about it... and I love them! Because it's a starting point into talking about my side project, which I love doing with people! I'm not discouraged by someone questioning why I'm building my thing, because I know perfectly well why I'm building my thing and I enjoy sharing that with people.
The OP is 'begging the question', by not explicitly stating the purpose of such conversations, and the fundamental reasons for avoiding these questions. Here is the critical paragraph:
>"It is almost certain that if someone is smart enough to build a search engine while living off of ramen, they also know more about what Google is capable of. Your attempt to question them is not helpful to anyone. If anything, you’re totally denying the fundamental aspect of innovation and entrepreneurs throughout history who have established that one or ten person team can conquer many a Goliaths, or bring to the world something entirely new."
Notice how the author says: "[y]our attempt to question them is not helpful to anyone". They also say imply that non-technical conversations about start-ups are basically useless: "[t]here is already enough knowledge about startups".
> who have established that one or ten person team can conquer many a Goliaths, or bring to the world something entirely new.
I wonder how many of those teams couldn't answer what was better about their product than the one they were replacing? I'll bet Google themselves could have answered that question, comparing themselves to Yahoo, back in the day.
I think the key part is less that and more the way of phrasing it. So you're encouraged to ask non-technical questions how they're supposed to be better than the competition but not allowed to say "but Google dominates that space, doesn't it?" to imply they don't necessarily need to exist. (though the author also says "I think your UI is not good" is 'constructive' feedback, so they don't think you have to be nice!)
I think there's a point to that especially if it's a business you don't know and you're not a VC or angel, but I also think there's a surprisingly large number of entrepreneurs out there who are smart enough to live off ramen and program something complex like a search engine who do have a massive blind spot about routes to market or the complexity required for the software to actually be viable rather than just minimum. Sometimes the blunt approach "doesn't the network effect of $dominantplayer create a massive lockin" is more helpful than a general "so how are you going to get customers?" which is easy to answer with a generic "sales/marketing/referrals/affiliates". The entrepreneur ought to be able to give a more interesting answer to the first question, and if they aren't able to they're going to need to figure it out...
I had just that conversation with one of the founders of Cuil. Anyone remember Cuil? Search engine company, 2008-2010. They actually got it running, but not very well. I asked what the revenue model was. They didn't have a good answer. They ran out of runway before finding more investors or revenue.
Cuil was a nice demo, though. With under 100 people, they got a search engine going that did its own crawls and was roughly comparable to early Google. But this was before Google started to really suck, and there wasn't a market.
Google hired their key people to keep them off the market.
Holy shit. I had completely forgotten about that until just now. Reading your comment, I was struck by the most intense déjà vu. Took me a few seconds to place it.
3‽, might as well start looking up those old rage comics.
There was more pressure back then to build a profitable business. Today there are companies growing by funding round after funding round without reaching profitability.
"If you cannot espouse the benefits and possible market of the product you yourself are building - why are you building it?"
Basically - be your own advocate. If you can't handle someone asking about your product (even in a negative fashion) how the hell can you hope to have the conviction and drive to actually sell it?
You don't need to "convince" every critic - but you sure as hell need to be able to step into the ring and talk to their points.
This is the same reason debate teams often explicitly spend time reviewing the problem from their opponents perspective - you must be able to understand and counter arguments from your detractors.
This article makes me very curious about what the author considers an existential question. I don't disagree with the content of the article, but the title is throwing me. None of the examples he gave of unproductive things to say are questions at all, and I would consider one of his recommended questions (What is the competition missing that you think you got?) to be pretty close to an existential question for a startup.
I took it to mean any question that, if you don't have a good answer, means your startup shouldn't exist. Like if the answer to "why would someone use you instead of Google" is null, then you are probably not going to successfully compete with Google. Or, you could come up with the best tool that ever existed for converting WEBP images to PCX, and if you don't have an answer for "who on earth has used the PCX format in the past thirty years" then you're probably not gonna sell many copies of that tool.
But the article's author would probably regard "why would someone use your engine over Google" as a reasonably good question, as opposed to "nobody is going to use your engine over Google because it's a household verb".
It's not the same as the author's example "what makes you believe you can do better than Google" because that question assumes you are doing exactly the same thing as Google: that all the prospective users of the idea are fully satisfied with Google, and have to be convinced to use something else for no reason at all. Your "why would someone use your search engine over Google" is better; it's more closely in line with "how will you get your first users".
> "why would someone use your engine over Google" as a reasonably good question, as opposed to "nobody is going to use your engine over Google because it's a household verb".
Well, one of these is a question, the other is a statement... Actually I noticed that if you look at his examples of what not to say, none of them are questions. So maybe a better idea is "don't say discouraging things to your founder friends, ask them questions instead."
GP picked that example because the article explicitly calls it a bad question. The third paragraph of the article:
>Let’s say your friend is obsessed with building a new search-engine. When you ask them why do they believe they can do better than Google, you are literally telling them that they shouldn’t be doing this since if it was ‘correct’ or possible or profitable, then Google would have already done that. This is bad.
I don't know if I agree with you. The point of the article is that those questions are not only unhelpful, they're distracting, and you shouldn't be trying to distract a founder. The reason why people are asking those questions is because they themselves are nervous and they're projecting their nerves onto you.
It's more the point that sometimes you don't want to have to justify yourself to all and sundry, especially when the person you're talking to has no real insight and wants to appear smart. I've been to loads of events where you just want to have a nice chat and before you know it you're getting a lecture on all the ways in which you're going to fail. One time, I didn't even want to talk about my stuff but was basically forced to have to justify myself.
Do this a few times and it gets exhausting. It's got nothing to do with whether you can answer the questions, and everything to do with the fact that sometimes you just don't want to answer the questions.
"Yeah, that's the kind of thing I spend all day working on, but right now I just want to hang out with you guys and have dinner / play this game / enjoy the party / whatever."
The answer is somewhere in the middle. If you aren’t the end user, asking them these questions doesn’t help. Simply because you aren’t the end user.
You thinking that you know what the end user wants is the same as the founder not talking to end users. In that case, you aren’t helping one bit.
It is the same as a bunch of founders sitting around judging each other’s product. How does that help?
These questions need to be asked by the end user. They are the people ultimately using the product. Only they can say whether it is something they want to use.
> It is almost certain that if someone is smart enough to build a search engine while living off of ramen, they also know more about what Google is capable of.
I'm not sure this is a given. Tons of brilliant developers (myself included) build complex products without having ever considered the market, or just assuming that users will come out of the woodwork if it's technically awesome enough.
Seems to me that if a founder doesn't have immediate answers to some of these "existential questions", that's a red flag right there.
Yeah the premise is clearly untrue. People build useless stuff all the time. If you're going to build something without having answers to these questions you need to be honest with yourself that you're doing it for fun, and for many that moment will not come unless they are challenged on it.
The message I get is that if you are a founder's friend, it's not your job to do the heavy criticism. He will get criticism all around the entire day anyway, you don't want to add into it.
But I bet there are reasonable exceptions everywhere. It's way too complex an issue to have such a simple answer.
> if you are a founder's friend, it's not your job to do the heavy criticism
What will your product do that Google doesn't and why can't (aren't) they do(ing) it isn't heavy criticism. It's reality checking.
The article posits questions asked in bad faith. ("You, for some reason, do not really believe in his idea. You, with some self-righteous zeal, also want to save your friend from some tragic failure.") The questions aren't the problem. The motivations of the person asking them are.
The takeaway isn't "don't ask founders existential questions." It's don't surround yourself with "friends" who don't believe in you, won't tell you that to your face and whose conversation consists of backhanded criticism.
Sorry. Existential questions will be asked until they get answered. Because is an okay answer, but it doesn't say anything flattering about you.
Also, if someone is so lost that they think the question needs asking... You may already have gone too deep down the path of burning investor dollars on what may ultimately end up as churn.
In highschool I was friends with a Mormon kid. After graduation I was headed for college and he was headed out on his two year mission trip to Brazil.
Personally, I thought it was a very foolish decision to spend two years going door to door in Brazil. I also thought it was a net negative as I don't believe in Mormonism and don't think it's a good thing to recruit more people to believe in it.
I was conflicted about what to do. Should I try to convince my friend he was wrong to go? Just stay quiet, like this article recommends or ask some politely phrased question?
I wound up splitting the difference and tried gently making the case to him that he wasting his time. I didn't come at the argument as hard or often as I might have and I didn't leave it entirely alone. We had one awkward conversation about it, that I could tell he found off-putting or offensive, and that was that. He went off to Brazil and I never saw nor spoke to him again.
I still don't know what the right thing to do then was and I have the same conflict about the advice in this article. If I genuinely think my friend is making a mistake I shouldn't directly confront them about it? I don't think I buy that, even if it makes things less awkward.
I see the polite rephrase advice as being generally good probably. I'd just say that it's probably different by person. Some people prefer direct challenges. "You'll never do it without a great UI!"
If you doubt your friend's plans. Don't go at it trying to convince him he's wrong. Go at it trying to understand why he thinks it's a good plan. If you want to be direct 'I don't believe this will work without a great UI, am I missing something? ' is much better than 'you'll never do it without a great UI'.
Both are direct and confronting. The first is aggressive, the second is dialogue.
Turn the situation around. How often do you enjoy hearing someone's opinion on something where they haven't even tried to understand your goals, motivations, and values? And instead just spouted off what they think?
> If you want to be direct 'I don't believe this will work without a great UI, am I missing something? ' is much better than 'you'll never do it without a great UI'.
If someone is unable to turn one into the other in their head probably they shouldn’t be doing a startup really. I understand that one shouldn’t be a jerk, but we also don’t have to go around like other people are made of eggshells. “You will never do it without a great UI” is a perfectly fine thing to say if you believe that. A healthy, well adjusted human being can say to that “you are right and this is how we will get a great UI” or tell you “you might think that, but actually” or they might shrug and ignore you or any other variation. If their world collapses from a tinny bit of adversity, and they fold like a wet napkin they should do something less stressfull.
Sure. They can probably handle it. But should being around friends test 'if they can handle what you say'? I hope that is not what my friends think (except for my puns). Especially around friends it would be nice if that is where the pin-pricks stop, and you just get to feel at ease a bit.
I find that as a general rule, it's best to assume that people know what they're doing and what's best for them. So in this case I'd ask why he was doing it, what his motivations were, etc.
Aside: I'd assume that as his friend, you'd already know that it is common for Mormons to do this!
In any event, if it's a life choice like this (or marriage, or a new career), then telling him that he's doing the wrong thing is not likely to result in anything positive, other than you feeling better (?) about yourself.
The title says `Please don't ask founders existential questions`, but the article tells me not to berate my friends with pessimism about their startup ideas. Thanks for the tip!
As a founder you are fighting an uphill battle every step of the way. I'm not sure trying to convince the world to stop with the middlebrow dismissals en masse will bear much fruit. If the naysayers are getting you down you need to find coping strategies like spending time with more positive people, or just not talking about your startup with people who aren't helpful. There's a reason incubators are a thing.
As a founder you have to be a little bit delusional in order to balance out all the naysayers in your life (especially the ones who are closest to you!). It's a lonely game until you "make it" - and then everyone suddenly wants to be your friend / family member.
If your business skill is good enough to sell your probably-useless thing(Which it may well be), then you'll probably have no problem answering a casual question, right?
Just say it's a privacy preserving deep learning homeomorphic blockchain to end war and famine with a novel proof scheme for your digital legacy and we'll be like "Yep that's some buzzwords, I bet someone will buy it" and move on.
If you don't have an answer at all what will you tell customers?
Well I expected this blog post to be about something completely different. Really the title should just be "Don't ask founder how their idea is supposed to work". Asking how they are going to complete with <insert competitor here> is 100% valid. That's not an "existential question".
I see people saying "you're gonna need to answer those questions", "brush it off", "you should be able to accept critique". If you're soliciting feedback or making a a pitch, all valid.
If it's just rando's? Nah, those founders should not just accept a high level of noise out there. A lot of people are happy to share their pessimism. That's tiring.
Well, as someone who has literally built a search engine and paid for it out of pocket, I'll argue the profit question is deeply relevant, it's the question you should have an answer for before even considering investing actual money into this field. Most search engines just aren't profitable.
Me, I've chosen to simply reduce burn rate so much it isn't much of a problem. I can do this non-profit because I think the world needs it. But if that isn't you, if you actually want to live off your work, you need an answer to this.
Google makes it work through being a major player in advertisement. If you had Google's search service, but not their advertisement-ability, you would struggle to make ends meet. Maybe you could do like Kagi intends and offer a subscription service. Maybe that will work. Who knows.
How you will compete with Google is a far less tricky question. There are several niches they rather visibly flounder in. I'd estimate their biggest problem is they are trying to do too much at once, making their service not quite great at any given thing. It's reasonably easy to build something that's superior at just one thing.
If people are not paying you and you cannot self sustain why would you think world needs it? In fact, the world is clearly giving you a signal it doesn't need it.
(I am being rhetorical here. It's very easy to break down things this way imo and I think it's the point of the article. talk with your founder friends with compassion and trust)
Well even this I have an answer to: Because I find it useful. That's the entire reason I built my search engine. I'm sharing it with others as a service for others to use if they want. If they do not want to use it, that's also fine. It is a niche service for a niche audience.
I think, if you're going to do any sort of work in public, you need to be able to deal with the fact that there are blunt people who love to share their strong opinions.
Personally I love questions. Especially from people with no background whatsoever in business, tech or the field in question. The interest clusters of responses help to attune to public perception.
Amazingly, the main one I get (seven years and counting) is "don't they have that in Japan already?". So on our timeline, entry #3 or something is "Research in Japan". Total waste of money, but a memorable trip!
It seems really weird not to as ask the question "why would someone use your engine over Google," as a friend because "Why would I use your search engine over Google?" is exactly what every single customer is going to ask, prospective employees and founders aside.
If that's not something they have a cogent answer for, they should probably look into some other line of business.
Actually think founders need to look existential questions in the eye, and figure out reasonable answers to them. Yes the questions are better framed in an open-ended non-demeaning way, but asking them will save you from locking yourself up for years building something nobody wants.
Also, building a better version of X is usually less promising than building the first version of Y. Especially when X is pretty well-executed.
Robin Williams had a quote that was along the lines of
"whenever people ask me for advice on how to become a successful comedian, I tell them they won't make it and they should give up. Anyone who listens to me and gives up wouldn't have made it anyways, and that saves them hardship down the road. Anyone who has the determination to make it along the hard path wouldn't listen to me anyways"
I disagree with the article. Also existential questions are something different than what the article author believes to be.
And somehow agree with not being mean, but if a person is going to be discourage by such very common and non evil meanly formulated comments, how are they going to survive in the wild?
Author of the post here. Trying to respond to some of the comments. Firstly, apologies- I didn't intend to make anything click-baity. As a matter of fact, I didn't even post it here. I realized that I could have titled my post like "How to ask founders good questions".
But, and in all honesty, as a founder, it did/does feel such questions are existential. I used _search-engine_ as a mask, I'm actually building a deep-tech (I've commented/posted on HN before).
When you put everything on the line to build a startup for a mission you believe in to the extent that you can't even separate your existence from your startups 90% of the awake hours, then when such questions come from (this is important) "a specific set of stakeholders", it does become existential. I love being asked all these things from a random person or at a random pitch event. But when you're my colleague, co-founder, or my hero, or a potential investor who I've been in the loop with for weeks, then when you ask such questions, it does get hard.
Someone below suggested that such people probably shouldn't start a startup, but on the contrary, I wrote it not to whine about myself, but only with the sincere hope that if there's someone who is less tougher than I am, he/she would be more cared for (in the odd chance that someone reads it).
The true origin of this post was in my experience with building my indoor farming startup that will grow the best quality produce, cheaper, and way more resource efficiently than traditional agriculture. Ofc I've done my homework and I am actually taking a risk and doing the very uncomfortable by deciding to work on it. Imagine jumping back and forth between research-papers, circuit diagrams, dying-plants, finance, etc. etc., and then someone very relevant asks/tells you "you can't beat the oldest industry known to humankind", or "why can Infarm (a unicorn in the vertical) not do this?", "maybe just work on indoor grow lights (since it fits more into the standard lean startup model". In that moment, it seems existential. Maybe I interpret it wrong, but I interpret it as if you're telling me that my startup shouldn't (can't exist) and yes I'm so obsessed with my startup that I take it personally (again, only when it comes from specific stakeholders). I can give them the numbers, but if they say it can't be done or if it could have been done, it would have been done, then that's same as saying that I should shut up.
> But when your my colleague, co-founder, or my hero, or a potential investor who I've been in the loop with got weeks, then when you ask such questions, it does get hard.
I'm not a founder of anything, so I understand if this is just part of an experience that I've not had, but those are exactly the sorts of people who I would absolutely want to ask these sorts of questions. At least in my life, if I want to do something crazy, it's my close friends, my heroes, and my mentors that I go to first to get advice, and if I'm doing something that they don't see as sensible, I truly hope they tell me. I mean, they have done plenty of times already! And either I can give them a good answer and we can talk it over, or I can't give them a good answer, and then I know I need to think things over - either coming up with a better answer, or realising that what I was doing wasn't as sensible as I thought.
Likewise, I have friends where I hope I can be that person to them as well, and try and offer a critical perspective when I think they're viewing things in a rosier light than they realise. Obviously how you say that is always important, and in moments like that I try hard to frame my own perspective helpfully (and accept that my perspective may be missing something that they're seeing), but if there is a deep enough trust in a relationship, I think those sorts of things are possible and healthy.
It's hard because some of the "easy questions" require a long answer - and sometimes you really ARE in a startup that shouldn't exist (or can't exist yet) - and your friends might be the people who need to pull you out.
But often, if it's someone who is "involved" or interested or even a co-founder, they really do have the question and want to know the answer - or at least be reassured that you've thought about it.
A startup is always in the strange place of trying to do something easy enough that a startup can do it, and hard enough that nobody has done it yet.
I enjoyed your post and it resonated with me. Dumping cheap skepticism on a someone who is working hard to do something new is something I wish people would be more thoughtful about. It’s almost a reflex, but is it actually helpful?
The responses on this thread are kind of discouraging and missing nuance. It’s turned into “should you tell the hard truth or pretend the world is a fairy tale” (a false dichotomy) when it’s more like “don’t be a jerk in this moment”.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadBe mindful when asking that type of question. Not every founder needs to hear every question from you. But if they come to you for council, do ask those questions, because a ton of them they'd better have immediate answers to, and the rest they probably should have thought of already. But one of the most valuable services you can provide, as a friend, is to be a sounding board and to make certain they have iterated across all of those questions. That does mean a substantial mental investment from you in maintaining that checklist.
Rando existential question guy is going to do his thing regardless.
If you're a founder you should anticipate these kinds of questions and have answers for them that make sense; if you ask these kinds of questions you should expect an actual answer, even if you don't agree with it.
Edit, to hopefully avoid some predictable replies:
- If the point is "don't be a jerk" then fine, there's a way to ask these basic questions without being discouraging.
- The author is right if the project isn't supposed to be a business. "Why would someone use your hobby language instead of C++" is a stupid question because the point of writing a hobby language is the fun of writing it.
But if someone is putting their life savings into a business idea and can't answer the most basic questions about it... Maybe they need a little discouragement.
Edit, again:
Also, I'm not a founder, but I have a side project, and I've gotten these sorts of questions about it... and I love them! Because it's a starting point into talking about my side project, which I love doing with people! I'm not discouraged by someone questioning why I'm building my thing, because I know perfectly well why I'm building my thing and I enjoy sharing that with people.
>"It is almost certain that if someone is smart enough to build a search engine while living off of ramen, they also know more about what Google is capable of. Your attempt to question them is not helpful to anyone. If anything, you’re totally denying the fundamental aspect of innovation and entrepreneurs throughout history who have established that one or ten person team can conquer many a Goliaths, or bring to the world something entirely new."
Notice how the author says: "[y]our attempt to question them is not helpful to anyone". They also say imply that non-technical conversations about start-ups are basically useless: "[t]here is already enough knowledge about startups".
I wonder how many of those teams couldn't answer what was better about their product than the one they were replacing? I'll bet Google themselves could have answered that question, comparing themselves to Yahoo, back in the day.
I think there's a point to that especially if it's a business you don't know and you're not a VC or angel, but I also think there's a surprisingly large number of entrepreneurs out there who are smart enough to live off ramen and program something complex like a search engine who do have a massive blind spot about routes to market or the complexity required for the software to actually be viable rather than just minimum. Sometimes the blunt approach "doesn't the network effect of $dominantplayer create a massive lockin" is more helpful than a general "so how are you going to get customers?" which is easy to answer with a generic "sales/marketing/referrals/affiliates". The entrepreneur ought to be able to give a more interesting answer to the first question, and if they aren't able to they're going to need to figure it out...
Cuil was a nice demo, though. With under 100 people, they got a search engine going that did its own crawls and was roughly comparable to early Google. But this was before Google started to really suck, and there wasn't a market.
Google hired their key people to keep them off the market.
http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory
3‽, might as well start looking up those old rage comics.
There was more pressure back then to build a profitable business. Today there are companies growing by funding round after funding round without reaching profitability.
"If you cannot espouse the benefits and possible market of the product you yourself are building - why are you building it?"
Basically - be your own advocate. If you can't handle someone asking about your product (even in a negative fashion) how the hell can you hope to have the conviction and drive to actually sell it?
You don't need to "convince" every critic - but you sure as hell need to be able to step into the ring and talk to their points.
This is the same reason debate teams often explicitly spend time reviewing the problem from their opponents perspective - you must be able to understand and counter arguments from your detractors.
It's not the same as the author's example "what makes you believe you can do better than Google" because that question assumes you are doing exactly the same thing as Google: that all the prospective users of the idea are fully satisfied with Google, and have to be convinced to use something else for no reason at all. Your "why would someone use your search engine over Google" is better; it's more closely in line with "how will you get your first users".
Well, one of these is a question, the other is a statement... Actually I noticed that if you look at his examples of what not to say, none of them are questions. So maybe a better idea is "don't say discouraging things to your founder friends, ask them questions instead."
"LOL, do you really think someone is going to use your search engine over Google?"
>Let’s say your friend is obsessed with building a new search-engine. When you ask them why do they believe they can do better than Google, you are literally telling them that they shouldn’t be doing this since if it was ‘correct’ or possible or profitable, then Google would have already done that. This is bad.
Whereas users who use Google may have reasons to use an alternative engine even if it isn't strictly better than Google in every regard.
Probing into who those users might be and what their needs are envisioned to be is more constructive than "can you do better than Google"?
Do this a few times and it gets exhausting. It's got nothing to do with whether you can answer the questions, and everything to do with the fact that sometimes you just don't want to answer the questions.
You thinking that you know what the end user wants is the same as the founder not talking to end users. In that case, you aren’t helping one bit.
It is the same as a bunch of founders sitting around judging each other’s product. How does that help?
These questions need to be asked by the end user. They are the people ultimately using the product. Only they can say whether it is something they want to use.
I'm not sure this is a given. Tons of brilliant developers (myself included) build complex products without having ever considered the market, or just assuming that users will come out of the woodwork if it's technically awesome enough.
Seems to me that if a founder doesn't have immediate answers to some of these "existential questions", that's a red flag right there.
But I bet there are reasonable exceptions everywhere. It's way too complex an issue to have such a simple answer.
What will your product do that Google doesn't and why can't (aren't) they do(ing) it isn't heavy criticism. It's reality checking.
The article posits questions asked in bad faith. ("You, for some reason, do not really believe in his idea. You, with some self-righteous zeal, also want to save your friend from some tragic failure.") The questions aren't the problem. The motivations of the person asking them are.
The takeaway isn't "don't ask founders existential questions." It's don't surround yourself with "friends" who don't believe in you, won't tell you that to your face and whose conversation consists of backhanded criticism.
Also, if someone is so lost that they think the question needs asking... You may already have gone too deep down the path of burning investor dollars on what may ultimately end up as churn.
Personally, I thought it was a very foolish decision to spend two years going door to door in Brazil. I also thought it was a net negative as I don't believe in Mormonism and don't think it's a good thing to recruit more people to believe in it.
I was conflicted about what to do. Should I try to convince my friend he was wrong to go? Just stay quiet, like this article recommends or ask some politely phrased question?
I wound up splitting the difference and tried gently making the case to him that he wasting his time. I didn't come at the argument as hard or often as I might have and I didn't leave it entirely alone. We had one awkward conversation about it, that I could tell he found off-putting or offensive, and that was that. He went off to Brazil and I never saw nor spoke to him again.
I still don't know what the right thing to do then was and I have the same conflict about the advice in this article. If I genuinely think my friend is making a mistake I shouldn't directly confront them about it? I don't think I buy that, even if it makes things less awkward.
I see the polite rephrase advice as being generally good probably. I'd just say that it's probably different by person. Some people prefer direct challenges. "You'll never do it without a great UI!"
Both are direct and confronting. The first is aggressive, the second is dialogue.
Turn the situation around. How often do you enjoy hearing someone's opinion on something where they haven't even tried to understand your goals, motivations, and values? And instead just spouted off what they think?
If someone is unable to turn one into the other in their head probably they shouldn’t be doing a startup really. I understand that one shouldn’t be a jerk, but we also don’t have to go around like other people are made of eggshells. “You will never do it without a great UI” is a perfectly fine thing to say if you believe that. A healthy, well adjusted human being can say to that “you are right and this is how we will get a great UI” or tell you “you might think that, but actually” or they might shrug and ignore you or any other variation. If their world collapses from a tinny bit of adversity, and they fold like a wet napkin they should do something less stressfull.
Aside: I'd assume that as his friend, you'd already know that it is common for Mormons to do this!
In any event, if it's a life choice like this (or marriage, or a new career), then telling him that he's doing the wrong thing is not likely to result in anything positive, other than you feeling better (?) about yourself.
The title says `Please don't ask founders existential questions`, but the article tells me not to berate my friends with pessimism about their startup ideas. Thanks for the tip!
Just say it's a privacy preserving deep learning homeomorphic blockchain to end war and famine with a novel proof scheme for your digital legacy and we'll be like "Yep that's some buzzwords, I bet someone will buy it" and move on.
If you don't have an answer at all what will you tell customers?
If it's just rando's? Nah, those founders should not just accept a high level of noise out there. A lot of people are happy to share their pessimism. That's tiring.
Me, I've chosen to simply reduce burn rate so much it isn't much of a problem. I can do this non-profit because I think the world needs it. But if that isn't you, if you actually want to live off your work, you need an answer to this.
Google makes it work through being a major player in advertisement. If you had Google's search service, but not their advertisement-ability, you would struggle to make ends meet. Maybe you could do like Kagi intends and offer a subscription service. Maybe that will work. Who knows.
How you will compete with Google is a far less tricky question. There are several niches they rather visibly flounder in. I'd estimate their biggest problem is they are trying to do too much at once, making their service not quite great at any given thing. It's reasonably easy to build something that's superior at just one thing.
(I am being rhetorical here. It's very easy to break down things this way imo and I think it's the point of the article. talk with your founder friends with compassion and trust)
I think, if you're going to do any sort of work in public, you need to be able to deal with the fact that there are blunt people who love to share their strong opinions.
Amazingly, the main one I get (seven years and counting) is "don't they have that in Japan already?". So on our timeline, entry #3 or something is "Research in Japan". Total waste of money, but a memorable trip!
If that's not something they have a cogent answer for, they should probably look into some other line of business.
Also, building a better version of X is usually less promising than building the first version of Y. Especially when X is pretty well-executed.
Most top startups I see are carving out their own niche: https://topstartups.io/
"whenever people ask me for advice on how to become a successful comedian, I tell them they won't make it and they should give up. Anyone who listens to me and gives up wouldn't have made it anyways, and that saves them hardship down the road. Anyone who has the determination to make it along the hard path wouldn't listen to me anyways"
And somehow agree with not being mean, but if a person is going to be discourage by such very common and non evil meanly formulated comments, how are they going to survive in the wild?
Still constructive critique is more useful.
But, and in all honesty, as a founder, it did/does feel such questions are existential. I used _search-engine_ as a mask, I'm actually building a deep-tech (I've commented/posted on HN before).
When you put everything on the line to build a startup for a mission you believe in to the extent that you can't even separate your existence from your startups 90% of the awake hours, then when such questions come from (this is important) "a specific set of stakeholders", it does become existential. I love being asked all these things from a random person or at a random pitch event. But when you're my colleague, co-founder, or my hero, or a potential investor who I've been in the loop with for weeks, then when you ask such questions, it does get hard.
Someone below suggested that such people probably shouldn't start a startup, but on the contrary, I wrote it not to whine about myself, but only with the sincere hope that if there's someone who is less tougher than I am, he/she would be more cared for (in the odd chance that someone reads it).
The true origin of this post was in my experience with building my indoor farming startup that will grow the best quality produce, cheaper, and way more resource efficiently than traditional agriculture. Ofc I've done my homework and I am actually taking a risk and doing the very uncomfortable by deciding to work on it. Imagine jumping back and forth between research-papers, circuit diagrams, dying-plants, finance, etc. etc., and then someone very relevant asks/tells you "you can't beat the oldest industry known to humankind", or "why can Infarm (a unicorn in the vertical) not do this?", "maybe just work on indoor grow lights (since it fits more into the standard lean startup model". In that moment, it seems existential. Maybe I interpret it wrong, but I interpret it as if you're telling me that my startup shouldn't (can't exist) and yes I'm so obsessed with my startup that I take it personally (again, only when it comes from specific stakeholders). I can give them the numbers, but if they say it can't be done or if it could have been done, it would have been done, then that's same as saying that I should shut up.
I'm not a founder of anything, so I understand if this is just part of an experience that I've not had, but those are exactly the sorts of people who I would absolutely want to ask these sorts of questions. At least in my life, if I want to do something crazy, it's my close friends, my heroes, and my mentors that I go to first to get advice, and if I'm doing something that they don't see as sensible, I truly hope they tell me. I mean, they have done plenty of times already! And either I can give them a good answer and we can talk it over, or I can't give them a good answer, and then I know I need to think things over - either coming up with a better answer, or realising that what I was doing wasn't as sensible as I thought.
Likewise, I have friends where I hope I can be that person to them as well, and try and offer a critical perspective when I think they're viewing things in a rosier light than they realise. Obviously how you say that is always important, and in moments like that I try hard to frame my own perspective helpfully (and accept that my perspective may be missing something that they're seeing), but if there is a deep enough trust in a relationship, I think those sorts of things are possible and healthy.
It's hard because some of the "easy questions" require a long answer - and sometimes you really ARE in a startup that shouldn't exist (or can't exist yet) - and your friends might be the people who need to pull you out.
But often, if it's someone who is "involved" or interested or even a co-founder, they really do have the question and want to know the answer - or at least be reassured that you've thought about it.
A startup is always in the strange place of trying to do something easy enough that a startup can do it, and hard enough that nobody has done it yet.
The responses on this thread are kind of discouraging and missing nuance. It’s turned into “should you tell the hard truth or pretend the world is a fairy tale” (a false dichotomy) when it’s more like “don’t be a jerk in this moment”.