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zefi's comments

zefi | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: Product/Market Fit (Customer Dev) as a Service?

There is an absurdly high need for this service, but my god this is a hard task. I think the way to do this is spend 6 months working exclusively with about 10 early stage startups (pre PMF) which are relatively similar in the type of market they're going after. You then help them however you think you can in getting to PMF. Keeping the types of markets similar lets you get to actionable learnings quicker; an important learning for a gaming startup isn't going to be as useful for one built on enterprise sales. The help you provide could be customer interviews/sales/lead generation/landing page testing/anything. But the goal is to try and work out which of the tactics lead to the most progress for each startup, then create a playbook that can be applied to the next batch of 10 startups you help. Then as that playbook becomes more refined you slowly start to productise some of these services to speed up the process and add more startups to each batch. Then a few years down the line you have a low touch software product that will take founders through each of the steps you have worked out are most useful for startups operating in their type of market. This is a slow process for sure, but I think to be successful at this you have to acknowledge how broad the problem is and how little you know how to solve it right now.

zefi | 11 years ago | on: PersistIQ (YC S14) Hopes to Remove Excel From the Outbound Sales Process

This product looks great. I think that automating the sales process, from prospecting to closing will be a vertical that'll see huge growth over the next few years. Anything that helps companies make money faster and integrates with salespeople's existing workflows is an obvious winner. That's the good news, the bad news is how low the barrier to entry for this market is right now and will continue to be with the current business model. The company that becomes the leader in this will work out how to make something that is seemingly highly commoditisable (email sending and read receipts) solidly defensible so the next startup down the block can't just undercut you on number of prospects contacted per pricing tier. I suspect the answer will have more to do with more impressive mass personalisation rather than any network effects these companies can create. Fascinating space, this is a growth sector without doubt. The companies I recommend checking out: Stacklead, AutopilotHQ, Yesware, Streak and Docsend among others.

zefi | 11 years ago | on: Amazon Zocalo

Oh, apologies for misunderstanding! And thanks for the compliment :)

zefi | 11 years ago | on: Amazon Zocalo

I think it does look great. This is a really hard problem to solve and they've done an excellent job. I'm sorry if you feel otherwise.

zefi | 11 years ago | on: Amazon Zocalo

This product looks great. I run Kivo (www.kivo.com YC S13) we're trying to address a lot of the same problems around sharing and storage that Dropbox et al have missed out on. Zocalo seems like a really good first pass, but I don't think tying users to a specific storage platform is the winning strategy for something that's fundamentally a collaboration app. It shouldn't matter where someone stores their files, collaboration applications should exist as layers on top of existing content. Forcing users to move to a new platform is one more point of friction when it comes to adoption. Storage companies releasing collaboration products is like email providers only letting their users email other users of their service - Gmail to Gmail email product. The reason why email works as a communication protocol is because it is an open one. Content collaboration is the same, the company that will win this market will be the one that addresses it without letting the politics of the 'storage wars' poison its simplicity. The 'it just works' of Dropbox comes from its ability to store and sync any file without any change in user behaviour - it's just another folder. No one's created an 'it just works' product for collaboration yet, where it doesn't matter whereabouts your files are stored or who it is that you want to work with. That's what we're trying to do at Kivo, and we'll be announcing a set of integrations very soon to make that so. If you'd like to help, get in touch, my email's in my hn profile.

zefi | 11 years ago | on: Stop punishing your users

I work with Leo at Kivo. Thanks for pointing this out, we'll be fixing this ASAP. Sorry you felt punished!

zefi | 11 years ago | on: Stop punishing your users

Thanks for the feedback! I work with Leo at Kivo. We've gone through a fair few iterations of our home page and we know it's not perfect yet. Right now we're trying to throw people right in to the product itself and then if they have more questions after that then they can find them in the site. But you're right we need to be upfront about a lot of information, it's just a balancing act, we're trying to find the right point. Thanks again.

zefi | 12 years ago | on: Quora in the next YC batch

YC is run by some of the smartest people in the valley. Quora obviously see their ability to help with the direction and strategy of their business valuable.
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