I just got accepted into Y Combinator. It feels like a dream, because their motto is something I’ve been turning over in my head since I was a kid reading Paul Graham’s essays on a CRT monitor.
“Make something people want” sounds like simple four words, but it took me 14 years to unravel their deepest meaning.
Making Something
Computers had been my great escape. I grew up with a CRT “family computer” in the living room and I was allowed infinite access as it seemed educative in my household.
And since I was a preteen, I was hooked. The information density I could get when booting up this magical device was unparalleled. The internet and the thousands of faceless people I used to read and watch and learn from were my biggest inspiration.
So one day I had the best idea of my life where I sat down and decided “I should try to make something.” I read “The Good Parts of JavaScript”, watched tutorials on YouTube, and I started creating. One of the first useful programs I wrote was a physics simulator from what I was learning in my classes.
Around the same time, I discovered Hacker News, the orange site that still takes up hours every day.
I’ve been active every day on that site for over 14 years. It’s a bit more highbrow than regular news, and you feel a bit smarter than everyone else if you’re reading it. The posts at the top of HackerNews are always so nerdy and interesting. And just reading the comments often taught you a lot.
I somehow stumbled across this website by this guy named pg. From a first glance, it looked like a pretty outdated website. But because it looked old and hadn’t been updated in a while, it looked more serious like I should pay attention to it.
And I’m glad I did. I think one of the first essays read was this one, and I’d soon discovered his list of essays and started reading each one of them one after the other.
That’s around when I discovered this phrase, and it’s beautiful because you can keep unfolding it and you find more layers as you go along.
Make Something People Want
The first phase, naturally for anyone, is to make something. It feels good to enjoy and consume. That’s the biggest part of what makes us human, and so it feels good if you can create something, especially something that others will enjoy, consume, and value.
In my case, one of my earlier commercial projects was WordPress themes for people online for money. There’s one exchange where I do a couple of hours of work for $60 – and trust me, being a kid in India, it was a great deal.
So I got to the part now where I’m making something for people!
But turns out, what they were employing me to do was make ads; and I’m not sure if I wanted to sit around and look at ads all day.1
You might not be surprised, but turns out more people want ad creatives vs digital art. Despite not being fun, that was a signal into the people want part.
And the internet is run by businesses, who are a sort of people. It turns out that businesses generally pay if you do a few things:
- make money
- save money2
- save time
With these realizations, I started stumbling closer to what people want. But still not enough to make a successful, scalable, software product.
And the right first step to do that: Shut up.
No, really. Stop building, stop speaking, and start listening.
As a founder, you make a lot of things. There’s even a phenomenon where you’ll tell yourself that any new idea you have is the greatest idea ever.
…But when you build it, it won’t have the reaction you expected, and you’ll tell yourself “Of course it was not going to work.” Then you find the next attractive thing, and then the cycle repeats ad infinitum. Classic Shiny Object Syndrome.
Here’s a tech blog that two of my friends and I started with the idea of giving the best news snippets. It was fun, and I spent a lot of time on the design and building the WordPress theme for it. Predictably (in hindsight) it brought us exactly zero dollars in income in cash, and we gave up after a few weeks.
It didn’t work because we didn’t make what people wanted. We made what we thought could be a cool idea. We didn’t take the time to estimate how many people want to read tech news site (demand) or how many tech news sites existed already (supply).
So now I had to figure out what people actually want, and the way I did that was I was to completely forget about my own self, and for many months I just tried to listen and understand.
I’ve talked to hundreds of builders in San Francisco and asked them about what they’re working on, where they wanted to go, and what changes they want in their lives. Because one thing we know to be true about humans is that we are always in a constant state of wanting.
And you’ve tried enough of those offline and online, you start to get an idea of what people are thinking about. You tap into the zeitgest, and you start acquiring taste, you you start to feel that you do know what people might want!
And that’s when you can go back and make again.
Making Something People Want
If you do that right, people sort of start liking you. If you come to San Francisco and talk about it, they give you resources and help you on the journey.
Over a series of three pivots, six product launches, 20,000 people served, I’m fortunate to finally build a product that seems to be what people want. A Series B CEO told me that this is the biggest release in his company’s history.
When it’s done right, when you finally make something that people want, the momentum feels unbelievable. And that’s why I was accepted into Y Combinator.
So now I’m in San Francisco, building a platform that lets software companies give users the power to build on top of them.
The last fourteen years were me figuring out what to make. And the next fourteen are going to be about making it matter. I’ll let you know how it goes.