What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?
Alexey Shashkov
6 replies
Hey Founders and Makers! 👋🙂
This question is from the YC application.
How would you answer this question?
Replies
Mayank Mishra@mishra_mayank
Poppins
This reminds me of the Peter Thiel's question "what valuable company is nobody building?"
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FromNotion
@mishra_mayank Hay Mayank. It looks that way. yeah) And what is your answer about your business?
Between
I think it really depends on a case by case basis. What unique knowledge did you learn by talking to users?
Here are some example answers.
Dropbox:
Competing products work at the wrong layer of abstraction and/or force the user to constantly think and do things. The "online disk drive" abstraction sucks, because you can't work offline and the OS support is extremely brittle. Anything that depends on manual emailing/uploading (i.e. anything web-based) is a non-starter, because it's basically doing version control in your head. But virtually all competing services involve one or the other.
With Dropbox, you hit "Save", as you normally would, and everything just works, even with large files (and binary diffs ensure that only the changed portions go over the wire).
The Muse:
We understand the demographic, inside and out. Most of the people trying to hire these women, market to them, and entertain them are well outside of it. They may have the "fashion advice for women" angle down pat, but we have a deep and nuanced understanding of the ambitious professional that makes our fans rabid and our voice distinct.
The main concern that I wanted to address with the product I'm working on is the simplicity of use. When something is necessary, it needs to be simple and intuitive, but not lacking in scope. You need to figure out the delicate balance between the two. I won't claim that I'm 100% there, but I can assure you that when I started my product https://thebutterapp.com/ , I kept in mind what people disliked and built on that. Nobody has time to sit and figure out something for hours, especially when the thing itself is supposed to make your life easier