Wholeheartedly agree.

Personas are useful for developing a general character that you can refer to. But you still have to be able to say "Alice Robertson, who is a demand-gen marketer at $CUSTOMER, is a prime example of this persona and someone we should talk to during product research." If you can't speak to an actual human and validate your ideas, then you are at risk of creating a fake persona who sounds just plausible enough to convince you to make wrong decisions.

Definitely - but those are normally called "development partners" in B2B, right?

Those two personas were very helpful to me in my previous life as a technical marketer; they helped me learn when to leave a job. Any time a company I have worked for told me they're shifting emphasis from talking about our product with the actual users to talking about "solutions" for the buyers, I knew it was time to start sending out resumes because the product was about to stall and the work climate was about to get insufferable.

> They want it their way, despite there being multiple ways to Rome, and will cut off the conversation with orders, not arguments

I don't know about your experiences, but insisting on this point can be a death sentence. I've spent most of my career as "technical lead", carefully building an approach that works for what my team does based on an underlying theory that is very difficult to verbalize. I've found through experience that when I feel like the project is aligned with this theory, the project goes very well, and when it's not, it doesn't. I've considered thousands of small tradeoffs over 15+ years of developing these ideas.

At this point in my career, I've found that trying to explain the rationale behind my decisions is a losing game. It's a careful balance of a thousand factors that I'm constantly weighing and adjusting. If people share my goals and are interested in learning, great! I'll make some time to talk through parts of the theory with them. But it's not always during project time -- sometimes you just have to trust me.

Yes, you thought of six different ways to do it -- I probably also thought of those ways. I'd love to live in a world where we can have a quick conversation about them and then all agree on the path forward, but that's not how it works. In reality, whoever I'm talking to goes into "argument mode", focuses on irrelevant details, argues about the names of things instead of their substance, takes things personally, feels ownership of whichever idea they came up with first, etc. They say they just want to learn, then they expect me to transmit 15+ years of thinking into their brains in a short conversation, while they argue with me on every little point.

There are a thousand ways to do anything, which means it's critically important to reject most ideas immediately. That often means hurt feelings. It's just better to have the person with the vision making the decision. If you don't want to go with my vision, my theory, that's fine: go with someone else's. One other person's vision, and then don't argue with that person either.

Of course there is room for discussion, feedback, learning, and debate, but this may be better done "off cycle".

"Their way" - some way has to be chosen, without too many back-and-forth.

In addition to technical there could be other reasons to prefer a solution. Some of those reasons can't be stated - for various reasons, like privacy or intuitiveness.

There are some reasons people like that are rewarded, and not all of those reasons are bad.

That comes down to the ability to say no (or at least "not yet"). I have seen lots of startups that land a few mid or big clients and lose the plot by serving every throwaway request the client makes. Doing this slowly turns your product into a bespoke solution not fit for others. There needs to be constant tension between the product goals and its application, and holding that line will always, always annoy a sizeable swath of users.

Apple famously ignored users on lots of fronts: can't manually add RAM, mouse has 1 button, etc. They didn't serve one type of user specifically so they could appeal to a larger market. You can't serve everyone.

You don't have a product until there's ~3 customers, with perspective to more. Before that you're essentially a consultant. I'll add that to the next version of the doc, too.

The point is: For anything you build, you can find 1 customer. It's only when there's multiple customers that like the product and want to improve it where you move from "consulting" or "custom development" to "product".

This rings true. A previous job I had did email analytics for the investment banking industry (from boutique firms up to the largest banks in the world). I kid you not, the single biggest driver of our success was the simple fact that our expertise in email meant that we fixed problems that almost all these firms had with email deliverability (bad IPs, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, broken unsubscribe functions, etc) over the actual product itself. This was in our best interest as our product was useless unless recipients could get email delivered to those that wanted it, but it was eye opening.

Do what Basecamp does [0]. They have one price for any size of customer and more importantly do not let any one customer, no matter how big, pay more for Basecamp and turn into a client as you say.

[0] https://www.inc.com/magazine/201606/jason-fried/saying-no-to...

I will add a section. Pay yourself a salary at the very latest the moment you've raised funding. If a VC objects to you doing that, get a different VC. You're in for the long run, and support from your family etc. is important, and you're already taking on a huge risk by pooling all your risk in one company, vs. the VC who is happily diversified.

Investors who imply you shouldn't take a salary are no bueno.

I'm not sure austerity wages for founders are really a thing anymore. Serious investors understand that team turnover is as or more scary than fiscal drama.

There was a longstanding "ramen profitable" ethos on HN, but part of that is rooted in a much older set of YC deal terms and lower expectations for seed rounds. But YC is now one of the principal components of all tech startup funding, the standard terms are much better, syndicated seed rounds have gotten pretty big; I think you're expected not to be silly about comp, but I don't think people are looking for you to signal commitment or virtue or asceticism with your comp package.

If you can't pay yourself a real comp package, something is probably wrong with your business.

I don't think you need 8 years to build a product people like, Prodfiler got good resonance and we built it in ~18 months, it would probably take 4 months now...

Author here. I'd be curious what went wrong in your case? (Also, happy to soften that advice further if there's strong evidence that people find the advice detrimental).

(not the author, but here's how I think about it)

Assuming that you're not a commodity product, it all kinda nets out in the end. If you have a competitive market, you have proof that people want your product at a good price, else no one would be in the market. If you execute better than all of your competitors, then you can theoretically take every last penny of that market.

I don't think the competitive pressure changes the decision whether there's revenue to be made in a certain space, though it may change the personal decision if the operating tactics required in a competitive market are personally fun for you the human being.

Good question. I think I did it to indicate that we sold to public companies.