This was a very interesting video. Thank you for sharing it.
I'm not launching anything anytime in the upcoming future, but I often dabble on side projects for fun with a dream of "launching something, someday", and I thought this was helpful / encouraging, especially early in the video where founders-wanting-to-be-perfect-to-launch was discussed!
I think suggestions like this are great to be sharing with the community. Thanks YC!
I always love this video, it's an updated one from the older one from Startup School, also by YC. It's really true, people don't really remember launches, in the long run, it's all about sustained usage of the product.
I’m working on mehungry dot app that I launched last week. It’s the 1 hour mvp and after some positive feedback, now I’m working on my next milestones with tons more features.
My goal is to simplify healthy eating and improve nutrition habits.
I asked people outside various grocery stores and most folks do not know how to read nutrition labels nor identify healthy foods. My dad was able to practice some healthier eating habits and get his BP from hypertension to normal.
Please feel to reach out if you have any questions or advice for me. I’m new to this so I appreciate your message.
YC videos have been instrumental for me as someone who is a self taught engineer and wants to build useful software.
As someone that has had high BP from their 20s, I would not trust any app to give me good advice, because I found that mainstream dietary advice, especially surrounding circulatory problems, is utter nonsense.
In my deep dive into the world of low carb, I learned that elevated levels of fructose/uric acid reduce the synthesis of nitric oxide, a known vasodilator, among other mechanisms (did you know that the explosive nitroglycerin is an effective vasodilator?). High blood pressure is reversible by reducing the amount of insulin spikes and ingested simple sugars, and low carb is the most effective method.
Yet most apps tend to pride themselves in "medically approved science here!", which means the usual story of eating less meat and saturated fat, and exercising more. "Leafy vegetables!"
The problem is that medically approved science that your GP offers tends to be about 25 years out of date, so we're at least a generation away before we have apps that tell you to stop eating bread, cereals for breakfast and heaping bowls of fruit, but instead eating real, non-sugary foods and not to shy away from saturated fat.
Now I am 50kg overweight than my first hypertensive diagnosis in my early 20s, and I have better blood pressure in about 2 weeks of eating fewer carbs than I did at the time when I was fit as a trout, but with tight arteries.
And don't get me started on cholesterol and statins, because I'll be here all day.
I respect your enthusiasm and journey to get healthy. My experience is I went on a low fat, low simple carb, low sugar diet (commonly referred to as vegetarian) and lost over 30 pounds and reduced my LDL by 60 points over 4 months.
I think it’s unfortunate that the Keto industry has chosen to brand themselves low carb/high fat. Rarely do they distinguish good fat from bad fat and good carbs from bad carbs. Keto gets its benefit from low simple carbs , not high saturated fats.
I avoid or minimize saturated and trans fats. When I do eat meat now I eat lean meats. Eat whole non-boxes foods, mostly vegetables,legumes,oat meal, brown rice, some whole wheat and fruits, some chicken , turkey fish, and eggs. Red meat and dairy rarely.
Edit on initial reply: “Keto gets its benefit from avoiding low simple carbs , not from avoiding complex carbs or consuming high saturated fats.“
This is an insanely valid point, and I didn’t realize til I just looked it up how many people have high blood pressure. But isn’t the problem with medically approved science assuming that any given metric or recommendation works for everyone? This happens on both ends; apps marketing advice based on some amount of science without specifying or understanding who it does and doesn’t apply to, and us consumers taking the “it’s science” to mean it’s supposed to work for us, and that if it doesn’t it means the science was wrong. Scientists and papers and doctors definitely do not agree on everything dietary, and any given scientist or doctor will give you different dietary advice if you have high vs low blood pressure. (But I guess it’s good to look at the things that all doctors and scientists do agree on.) Lowering saturated fat and meat intake and increasing fiber intake actually is generally good advice for a lot of people, especially if they’re overdoing it, but definitely not everyone and most especially not everyone with specific health issues. I’m a little surprised by the comment that advice to eat low carbs feels a generation away to you. I can’t think of specific apps, I guess, the only dietary apps I’ve used track macros and calories, and don’t make recommendations. But, practically everyone I know is highly carb aware and many have tried the Atkins diet for weight loss and/or high protein for workouts, with varying levels of success. It’s gone far enough that I’m starting to hear people talk about how we’re eating way too much protein, and that people misunderstand carbs (they build muscle as well). While that might be true for many, it’s definitely not considering high blood pressure, nor, for example, celiac or Crohn’s disease. I guess we always need to remember, both when making apps and when buying them, that whether the correlation a scientist found in a study works for someone may depend entirely on how closely this person matches the study cohort, and we have to remember that assuming we can project correlations found in a cohort to a wider audience has historically been one of the best ways to get science wrong, right?
The videos from Dr. Paul Mason on that channel about cholesterol will tell you everything you need to know about statins, LDL, atherosclerosis. The whole channel is a treasure trove of research and plenty of citations. It's just too new for your GP to be aware of it.
tl;dr: statins don't do much apart from reducing a single metric of an entire systemic disorder, and have terrible side effects, LDL is positively correlated with longevity in healthy subjects, high levels of blood sugar destroy a "marker" protein on LDL cells, they stop being recognised and reabsorbed by the liver but instead they go and accumulate under artery walls. Atherosclerosis is not caused by dietary fat, but high levels of dietary fat paired with high levels of blood sugar.
In general, high levels of sugar alone are worse by all metrics that high levels of dietary fat, and very recent research seems to suggest mitochondria work better burning fatty acids than glucose (to be clear, the chemical pathway is exactly the same, but fatty acids skip a couple steps and produce fewer free radicals)
Keto and low carb may be very effective tools in your tool belt but I would caution you to exercise the same skepticism you have for the mainstream medical advice with fairly new world of keto and low carb. I have done it myself and it is undoubtedly extremely effective in losing weight but long term affects of drastic changes in diet are real.
It’s also a reason the application of dietetics can vary so much.
People will focus on their individual experience as a proxy for generalizing others way too much.
While there are some universal principles, extremes around eating both bad and eating healthy can be confused with eating simple or eating clean.
If someone has a cashew allergy, the practice of veganism can be life threatening where it’s used so much.
If you come from a certain area of the world, your genetics might be a little more used to benefiting from eating certain things than not, too. A negotiation for might be nice for me but for someone who’s being eating it well for a few generations..
They're electric pressure cookers, right? My slow cooker (Ninja 9 in 1) also does that, and it's super helpful for when I forget to put things on in the morning.
Together with a friend we recently started working on https://hocus.dev, a self-hosted alternative to Gitpod and Github Codespaces. It automates the provisioning of cloud development environments on your own infrastructure. YC content has been extremely helpful to us in choosing what to focus on initially (customer outreach), and what outcomes we should expect from our efforts. They also have a video on how to do initial marketing, and what really makes a difference is setting up analytics and paying attention to it. It’s a huge motivation boost to see actual people looking at what you made.
I'm just one person, but some feedback - the first sentence in your comment ("a self-hosted alternative to Gitpod and Github Codespaces") was far clearer than the main text on your landing page ("Stop waiting for code to build. Save 4 hours a week.").
Thanks for taking a look. We’ve found that most people who we show the page to have no idea what Gitpod or Github Codespaces is, so we decided to go with outlining the benefits first. But maybe we should put this line in the subheading.
As someone who has no idea what Gitpod or Github Codespaces is, I found the explanation online plenty clear: it’s a VM on the cloud pre-configured for a variety of common development needs.
My one piece of feedback is in the diagram for your system with the two boxes (“choose project”, “start coding”) I felt an urge to press the “choose project” box to see what templates you have.
You could leverage that, make the box actually go there if someone presses it. Of course leave the normal call for action that’s at the bottom of the page.
My memory failed me when I wrote the comment. The video where I heard them talk about analytics was about founder mistakes, not about analytics. https://youtube.com/watch?v=D56QeyyQMLI
Main issue I see with advice given is that it’s focused more on identifying list of potential context to launch instead of acknowledging that every new cohort based on a significant change to a product or service is potentially a new launch and that compiling various reasons to launch is generally meaningless. Said another way, every new significant variation based on real customer feedback is your next MVP (minimal viable product) with the goal of reaching PMF (product market fit) — where PMF is ultimately the true MVP.
Maybe not clone… but I have suffered in the past by not using competitors products. One of the easiest UI/UX steps you can do is use a bunch of products solving similar problems and see what you like and don’t like. It’s insane how often I see people asking for UX tips and people tell them to hire a designer.
That approach is called the "fast follow" strategy in business vs. the "first mover" strategy. There are some advantages in fast follow vs. first mover but also some key disadvantages, especially in markets of winner-take-most, or when you need a large amount of capital and the early leaders generally take the haul.
That being said, for bootstrap projects, side hustles, and other projects, I've really come around to your way of thinking. For those projects where being another alternative does have good economics, "copy first, innovate later" is a solid strategy.
Probably any lens and any modern camera can achieve this quality and look. The soft background is achieved by using a lower f-stop. In this example the background isn't really too blurry though so you shouldn't need anything special.
You'll need to spend more time on lighting than anything else to reproduce the overall feel.
It’s also about proper lighting and good color grading. But a basic setup can do this. And use Final
Cut Pro or Davinci Resolve for existing/grading. Premier too, but less recommendable to start.
If you’re thinking of producing content that looks and sounds this good, proper lighting and sound reflection deadening is key. When I have hired cinematographers to produce content like this, they show up with a whole lot of lights, reflectors, etc. along with high quality microphones.
OT but she's obviously reading a prompter, and combined with that forced super-enthusiastic smile like she's telling us we finally defeated cancer (or announcing the second coming?), it's quite off-putting. Why can't people talk normally.
A 21 minute video and the term launch was never really defined. What exactly is a launch anyways? Is it a press release? Getting a website up? Email blasts? A big PR blitz? Or are each of those things separate launches in themselves? There seems to be an implicit expectation that the audience of this video understands what a launch is, and that might be part of the problem.
Now there is a section that goes over the types of launches, but perhaps that should have been first in the presentation and go over what exactly is a launch and when do you do it?
Launches originate from the idea of a boat that's ready for sailing, and the first launch comes out of the dry dock. But even in that case, ships need many more months before their first sea trials (a different kind of launch), and then something else before ready for whatever their purpose is.
Like many other YCombinator videos, I think these assume much more understanding of terminology, lingo, and perception than the audience might actually have.
Also, I have a major problem with launching to "friends and family". In my experience, friends and family provide very poor advice and they're much more prone to be encouraging or want to provide emotional or moral support, without actually telling you if your business idea sucks. I burned years doing something that sucked, and when I stopped doing it, my friends and family told me they never thought it was a good idea. I asked them why they didn't stop me. And they said it would have been not nice to be completely honest. Ever since then, I've ignored friends and family and focus where it matters: on the customers who I want to buy stuff. I don't get why the recommendation for the 2nd launch after an MVP landing page is Friends and Family launch.
In that case, launching your website to capture the attention you will later sell.
I did found an ad powered business when I was 16.
You build a site. You create content. You spam the site wherever you can. You get organic traffic. If you're lucky you get SEO gods to pick you up and if you have a good product people will share it.
You can put -ads- whenever you want, but that will have consequences.
I wouldn't choose to build an ad-powered business in 2023 tbh, I hope ads die some die in the future as the lies they mainly are.
Also if you're doing that, you're probably prepping up your initial users to be sold as cattle to your future enterprise customers. Not cool.
52 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 67.9 ms ] threadI'm not launching anything anytime in the upcoming future, but I often dabble on side projects for fun with a dream of "launching something, someday", and I thought this was helpful / encouraging, especially early in the video where founders-wanting-to-be-perfect-to-launch was discussed!
I think suggestions like this are great to be sharing with the community. Thanks YC!
My goal is to simplify healthy eating and improve nutrition habits.
I asked people outside various grocery stores and most folks do not know how to read nutrition labels nor identify healthy foods. My dad was able to practice some healthier eating habits and get his BP from hypertension to normal.
Please feel to reach out if you have any questions or advice for me. I’m new to this so I appreciate your message.
YC videos have been instrumental for me as someone who is a self taught engineer and wants to build useful software.
Assuming you have a normal diet are the recipes it generates pretty healthy?
In my deep dive into the world of low carb, I learned that elevated levels of fructose/uric acid reduce the synthesis of nitric oxide, a known vasodilator, among other mechanisms (did you know that the explosive nitroglycerin is an effective vasodilator?). High blood pressure is reversible by reducing the amount of insulin spikes and ingested simple sugars, and low carb is the most effective method.
Yet most apps tend to pride themselves in "medically approved science here!", which means the usual story of eating less meat and saturated fat, and exercising more. "Leafy vegetables!"
The problem is that medically approved science that your GP offers tends to be about 25 years out of date, so we're at least a generation away before we have apps that tell you to stop eating bread, cereals for breakfast and heaping bowls of fruit, but instead eating real, non-sugary foods and not to shy away from saturated fat.
Now I am 50kg overweight than my first hypertensive diagnosis in my early 20s, and I have better blood pressure in about 2 weeks of eating fewer carbs than I did at the time when I was fit as a trout, but with tight arteries.
And don't get me started on cholesterol and statins, because I'll be here all day.
A link to get you started, if you want to base your app on up-to-date research: https://youtu.be/KlHPmJTihBc
Edit on initial reply: “Keto gets its benefit from avoiding low simple carbs , not from avoiding complex carbs or consuming high saturated fats.“
tl;dr: statins don't do much apart from reducing a single metric of an entire systemic disorder, and have terrible side effects, LDL is positively correlated with longevity in healthy subjects, high levels of blood sugar destroy a "marker" protein on LDL cells, they stop being recognised and reabsorbed by the liver but instead they go and accumulate under artery walls. Atherosclerosis is not caused by dietary fat, but high levels of dietary fat paired with high levels of blood sugar.
In general, high levels of sugar alone are worse by all metrics that high levels of dietary fat, and very recent research seems to suggest mitochondria work better burning fatty acids than glucose (to be clear, the chemical pathway is exactly the same, but fatty acids skip a couple steps and produce fewer free radicals)
What about the type of carbs in oatmeal, those are better right?
People will focus on their individual experience as a proxy for generalizing others way too much.
While there are some universal principles, extremes around eating both bad and eating healthy can be confused with eating simple or eating clean.
If someone has a cashew allergy, the practice of veganism can be life threatening where it’s used so much.
If you come from a certain area of the world, your genetics might be a little more used to benefiting from eating certain things than not, too. A negotiation for might be nice for me but for someone who’s being eating it well for a few generations..
How do you know how to identify healthy foods?
What is a "healthy" food?
My approach: healthier products aren't wrapped and don't have nutrition labels on them.
My one piece of feedback is in the diagram for your system with the two boxes (“choose project”, “start coding”) I felt an urge to press the “choose project” box to see what templates you have.
You could leverage that, make the box actually go there if someone presses it. Of course leave the normal call for action that’s at the bottom of the page.
Have a link, is it here? https://www.ycombinator.com/library/9h-how-to-get-your-first...
You can clone an existing app, and make it more scalable, more UX friendly, more extensible,...
That being said, for bootstrap projects, side hustles, and other projects, I've really come around to your way of thinking. For those projects where being another alternative does have good economics, "copy first, innovate later" is a solid strategy.
You'll need to spend more time on lighting than anything else to reproduce the overall feel.
Now there is a section that goes over the types of launches, but perhaps that should have been first in the presentation and go over what exactly is a launch and when do you do it?
Launches originate from the idea of a boat that's ready for sailing, and the first launch comes out of the dry dock. But even in that case, ships need many more months before their first sea trials (a different kind of launch), and then something else before ready for whatever their purpose is.
Like many other YCombinator videos, I think these assume much more understanding of terminology, lingo, and perception than the audience might actually have.
Also, I have a major problem with launching to "friends and family". In my experience, friends and family provide very poor advice and they're much more prone to be encouraging or want to provide emotional or moral support, without actually telling you if your business idea sucks. I burned years doing something that sucked, and when I stopped doing it, my friends and family told me they never thought it was a good idea. I asked them why they didn't stop me. And they said it would have been not nice to be completely honest. Ever since then, I've ignored friends and family and focus where it matters: on the customers who I want to buy stuff. I don't get why the recommendation for the 2nd launch after an MVP landing page is Friends and Family launch.
Once you start taking money, congrats you've launched.
I did found an ad powered business when I was 16.
You build a site. You create content. You spam the site wherever you can. You get organic traffic. If you're lucky you get SEO gods to pick you up and if you have a good product people will share it.
You can put -ads- whenever you want, but that will have consequences.
I wouldn't choose to build an ad-powered business in 2023 tbh, I hope ads die some die in the future as the lies they mainly are.
Also if you're doing that, you're probably prepping up your initial users to be sold as cattle to your future enterprise customers. Not cool.