Celebrate Doers“There are not enough people who do in this world.”
“There are not enough people who do in this world.”
Is that true? Is the world better off when more people are doing things?
Probably.
So why is it then that society surprises imagination and taking bold bets.
Why do people in the comment sections like to tell makers and creators that their content is dumb.
I ran into this scenario the other day when a few friends and I launched a product on Product Hunt. Our product costs users money, but we were giving away part of the software for free! “How nice” I thought!
But then we got a few comments about “how dumb” it was that we charged money. How “unfair it was that we were charging users!”
I generally ignore haters — but that somewhat goes against my principle of listening to everyone. Rather than listen to this person’s words, I found it better to try and understand where they were coming from.
1) We had no debt to this person. We built a product to make money. We can charge, she/he does not have to buy. Creators do not owe their “potential” customers anything.
2) Feedback is important. Perhaps this person was right. More likely, however, this person was just not in our target audience.
3) Which brings me to my last point, listen most carefully to those who you care about.
This is much harder said than done.
Why?
a) who do you care about?
b) what are you listening for?
c) what action are you supposed to take?
These are all hard, context specific questions that have no easy answer. The best product people are able to answer these questions really well (imo).
Originally published at gonen.blog.
By jordangonen on June 23, 2017.
Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.
