colmanhumphrey (u/colmanhumphrey)

colmanhumphrey commented on Zed is our office zed.dev/blog/zed-is-our-o... · Posted by u/sagacity

I kind of love this, although I feel like I'd need to try it out to understand exactly how it feels. I'd even like to see a video if Zed could make one. It would be good to understand e.g. if the issue of "who wrote that?" actually affects things in practice, or any other weirdness or limitations.

I also kind of get why it's built into an editor! I wonder how it compares to e.g. https://www.coscreen.co.

The default method of remote work, with e.g. Slack and video meetings, I think leaves a lot of potential on the table. I wonder if a flexible collaboration system like this could actually be a lovely default method for many companies.

colmanhumphrey commented on Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem colmanhumphrey.com/posts/... · Posted by u/KraftyOne

andybak · a year ago

I would also maybe add "picking a name that's impossible to Google and hard to remember".

The number of emails I get along the lines to "Your trial period of Foowazzle will expire soon" and my reaction is usually "I can't remember what the hell Foowazzle is".

In fact the reason I often fail to actually use trials of potentially interesting services after signing up is because I forget what they are called and can't find them when I need them.

At least "Foowazzle" would be easy to search for...

colmanhumphrey · a year ago

haha, not sure I agree with this one at all, I think a name is pretty far down the list of priorities for a business. I would be extremely surprised if "customers who started trials but then didn't use the product at all, but then later wanted to, but couldn't because they couldn't find the name" is a segment that moves the needle.

From this brief note, you sound like you potentially are trialling an order of magnitude more services than the average person. I bet that gives you a ton of interesting perspective on all these products, sign-up flows, etc, but probably puts you in a very unusual position with respect to product names!

colmanhumphrey commented on Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem colmanhumphrey.com/posts/... · Posted by u/KraftyOne

hintymad · a year ago

> Slacking around SQL snippets, schlepping around CSVs, devs having minor inconsistencies when running a bunch of ad-hoc queries: problems for sure, but not major ones for a small company.

This is a general theme: it is hard to fight "good enough". Even in a big-enough company, a competent engineer will have a good enough way to manage queries, while incompetent ones won't care. In the end, very few people will want to pay for such service, or even want to learn such service.

colmanhumphrey · a year ago

This rings true, and I guess further backs up how important it is to carefully choose your initial customers, so the product is actually good enough by the time it gets to the broader swathe of companies. At least, that's my guess — I'm the one that failed after all!

colmanhumphrey commented on Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem colmanhumphrey.com/posts/... · Posted by u/KraftyOne

mritchie712 · a year ago

Didn't see you mention Retool. I'd think if a company was aware of Retool, they'd always pick that over Slight.

colmanhumphrey · a year ago

I am surprised to hear you say this given your previous experience founding a product that from a distance might look to cover some similar space to retool but in practice is quite different. My perspective: only investors ever asked us about retool, not customers. Some of them even used retool tool. Hah even just typing this out brings me back to investor meetings!

colmanhumphrey commented on Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem colmanhumphrey.com/posts/... · Posted by u/KraftyOne

sirspacey · a year ago

This is such an excellent reflection, especially the iterative nature.

“Yes but” is now a part of my toolkit to help me authentically unpack all the justifications that come to mind & convert them into learning.

I’ve lead B2B SaaS revenue efforts a number of times. You correctly identified all the things that are hard and how customer size is a major factor in choosing what to build and how to sell.

My general recommendation for a tool like yours is to sell to the professional who would use it in a “b2b2c” format like Slack.

First win the champion, then the market they live in.

Excited to see what you choose next!

colmanhumphrey · a year ago

a very generous comment! Very interesting you say that, I believe we did at some point have some thoughts about targeting B2B2C, but sadly that was one of the areas we failed to fully learn about / experiment / iterate on.

colmanhumphrey commented on Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem colmanhumphrey.com/posts/... · Posted by u/KraftyOne

devmor · a year ago

> If you don’t know how your product will be adopted, how would your customers know?

I feel like this is both correct and incorrect at the same time, possibly because it’s almost a catch-22.

With any online product at all, not just SaaS, the way your customers use your product may end up entirely different than how you planned your product to work.

Of course, it’s important to have a direction to begin with, but I feel like analyzing how your customers use your tools and adjusting rapidly to that instead of sticking to what you wanted to build in the first place is what makes or breaks a lot of startups.

Take that with a grain of salt though, I’ve still never launched a product with an ROI greater than the value of the time I put into it.

colmanhumphrey · a year ago

oh that's an interesting perspective. I would say you're right, and maybe I didn't phrase it well. I probably should have said something more like: if you don't know how, or if you can't learn how (through iteration etc), then how can your customers. Or something to that effect.

colmanhumphrey commented on Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem colmanhumphrey.com/posts/... · Posted by u/KraftyOne

bitbasher · a year ago

They fell for the classic, "build a product and then find customers" strategy. It's the quickest way to burn 1-2 years.

I have a saas product that I have been running for several years by myself and I would consider it quite successful. The "strategy" I used (if you can call it that) was almost the exact opposite.

I witnessed customers paying services for a product. I looked at the product and thought, "Huh, I could do that and charge half as much" and then (the most important part), I did it.

colmanhumphrey · a year ago

That sounds like a very viable and valuable type of business, but it's kind of a different category of business model

colmanhumphrey commented on Tell HN: The ratio of wants-to-be-hired to is-hiring is at a record high 0.94 · Posted by u/jstx1

carabiner · 3 years ago

Ok so either way though, it's not really comparable to OP because it doesn't include 2023 data (i.e. all of the current recession).

colmanhumphrey · 3 years ago

If instead I had supplied a time series for eight years ending just prior to all of OP's data, you wouldn't discuss "comparing" the charts (I assume!), so it's a little unclear what the concern is with comparison.

If you just need the last few data points, of course you can either just look at OP's chart, or if you don't trust that data, then quickly get the data yourself. Again you can even create an account on slight.run and recreate the full graph if you prefer.

We are also not currently in a recession. If instead you're referring to market conditions that affected tech heavily, that was in place by Q3 2022 (e.g. https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/20/remembering-the-startups-w...), and this also lines up more closely with how the Fed has been raising rates (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFEDTARU).

colmanhumphrey commented on Tell HN: The ratio of wants-to-be-hired to is-hiring is at a record high 0.94 · Posted by u/jstx1

carabiner · 3 years ago

Looks like your chart only goes up to 2022 October? Whereas OP's goes up to today.

colmanhumphrey · 3 years ago

It includes the Nov 1 post, you can see the data here: https://slight.run/apps/colman/job_seekers_vs_job_hiring_hac... (Vega reads 2022-11-01 into your local timezone, hence why you're possibly seeing 2022-10-31).

They claim they update it daily (https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...) but they only update it every few months it would appear.

Of course you can manually get this data from the HN API and create a query built on https://slight.run/apps/colman/job_seekers_vs_job_hiring_hac... by adding the extra few rows manually (but unlike OP, I recommend you exclude non-top level comments).

colmanhumphrey commented on Tell HN: The ratio of wants-to-be-hired to is-hiring is at a record high 0.94 · Posted by u/jstx1

colmanhumphrey · 3 years ago

Here is a chart going back to 2014: https://slight.run/graphs/colman/ratio_of_seekers_to_hirers_...

Not quite as drastic as yours, but still not ideal.

The underlying query and data source: https://slight.run/apps/colman/job_seekers_vs_job_hiring_hac...

I'm restricting to top-level comments here, because those seem like a better proxy than all comments (excluding some discussion on a given post for example).