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Ask HN: When has “build it and they will come” worked in the startup world?

2 points by arjunb023 ↗ HN
The most fundamental tenet of building a startup is to understand a customer problem before building. Talk to users, find a problem, and build for that solution.

What are some unicorn startups founded in the last decade that didn't do that and found product-market fit?

7 comments

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onion2k
There aren't any. You can't grow a unicorn without understanding your customers.
petercooper
Not a unicorn, but the Basecamp folks have spoken before on how they focus on building a product their way and with entirely their own vision first, without getting customer feedback, and then see if it flies or not.
Graffur
Ignoring the last decade part and the unicorn part.. and just looking at successful companies:

Google, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Reddit, Amazon, AWS, Apple/iPhone, Steam, Microsoft/Windows/Office, Revolut, Dropbox, lots of web hosting companies like DigitalOcean etc., lots of cryptocurrency companies like Cardano etc.

One notable exception that pivoted a lot is Twitter. It started as a podcast service iirc. Netflix is an interesting one too. They switched from DVDs to streaming which paid off for them.

Of course all have changed and added features as they have grown but they're all close to their original ideas which, imo, matches "build and they will come"

webmaven
> One notable exception that pivoted a lot is Twitter. It started as a podcast service iirc. Netflix is an interesting one too. They switched from DVDs to streaming which paid off for them.

Another notable pivot was Flickr, which started as a backend feature of an MMO called Game Neverending (which was never released IIRC).

akshatmittal108
Well, to be fair many of them had some kind of prototyping to see if customers like the product or not before building the complete product and releasing it. AWS was first developed internally to solve their own developers problem. Dropbox had a very viral successful video to gauze customer interest. For Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg did develop many side projects (like gathering opinions about some historical art for class project etc) during his time in college before combining all the best features to release Facebook (which didn't have photo gallery feature at the time of release). One overlooked part I think is the network. I remember listening to interview of Stripe founder and he mentioned how that network helped in getting initial traction to the product, so it's not all about building in silos for months and hoping customers would come when the product is launched.
Graffur
Good points. Network is so, so important. It's how apps like TeamBlind, "Yo!" or the anonymous posting one (I can't remember the name) became popular even though there was no substance.