Keith Rabois argues that asking users what they want ruins consumer products. Users can't articulate their desires and mislead designers, he says, citing Porsche as proof. Build first, market second, without surveys.
Chapters
So I have a sort of counter view to the YC advice on this. I really don't like to talk to users. I think I would discriminate between consumer products and enterprise products though. On consumer products, I don't believe in ever talking to users. I think that fundamentally your job is to build a product for users, then market it to users, and sell the product to users. Your job is not to ask users what they want. In enterprise, because there are professional decision makers that are making a buying decision, they can to some extent communicate accurately what are the criteria? And then you can decide how to innovate to get to that criteria. So I think there is a split there, although I think you could build an enterprise company without talking to consumers. My view of building a company, building a product is like producing a movie. Nobody who produces a movie goes and interviews, you know, 10 people on the street and says, what movie do you want to see this weekend? That would be like insane and people would laugh at you. But I think building a product is just like a movie. You find a script, you have a story, you have a narrative, then you produce a trailer, you convince people to spend their money and enjoy the movie. the failure of talking to users is likely to produce the wrong products and mediocre products. The wrong products because consumers can't really articulate what they want. So for example, one kind of amusing talking point I like to use with colleagues is if you ask anybody you know that drives a Porsche while they bought a Porsche, they will give you every possible excuse except the real reason. They'll talk about the performance and the aesthetics and blah, blah, blah. That's almost never why someone buys a Porsche. So consumers actually will actively mislead you. Partially it's a conscious for subconscious decision making. Like even if they're trying to be helpful, they're actually misleading you. Secondly, one of the other reasons is that it produces mediocre products, even when it works, is that consumers can envision a different world. Like anything that's a step function forward, unless it was subject to a novel or maybe a movie, sometimes there's, someone else has created a vision that's fiction that they can tap into and repeat to you and then you're turning that fiction into reality. But absent a good movie or novel, most consumers can't imagine a different world.
