Listen to Feedback and Get The F* back to Work

An interesting conversation happened over at e27. My friend, Joash, wrote a post about something that ticked him off this week. It’s an interesting, long post. You can head over to his blog post to catch it in full. But here’s my quick summary:

(1) He isn’t too happy with people either tearing down or defending the founder of Found. He wants folks to comment on the app, the product, and discuss how we as a community can make it better. This is his vision of a start-up community.

(2) Some people complained about the voting system at the Top 50 apps awards. It’s hackable, and people can game the voting system easily to rack up votes. And apparently e27 isn’t fast enough to respond, at least according to Erwan Mace this blogger who also complained. But Joash wants to focus on the community. He wrote: “So yes, we have a flawed voting system that you can hack. But that is not the focus. The focus is how this competition can help build the community in Asia.”

Okay, no problems here. But it’s a good issue to talk about. I admire Joash’s vision of building a community, but find it a little unrealistic and naive (no offense). Trolls, defenders, supporters are all part of the community whether we like it or not. And in fact, I find smart trolls very helpful when trying to validate ideas. Personally, I like people who try to kill my idea, the more cruel the better. When I pitch my idea, I will tell people beforehand to kill it, and convince me not to spend time on it.

Here’s a personal experience that not many people know about. Prior to making PO a full time start-up, I actually travelled to LA and SF to meet entrepreneurs and investors to pitch an idea last year. It was totally random but I had the urge to see and experience the valley myself and thought that pitching an idea to random people would be the best way to do so.

The feedback was great. I mean, it was great in the sense that people were gunning the ideas down like they were the stupidest concepts ever pitched. Special thanks goes out to John Furrier who gave me one minute to pitch the idea. But I thought they killed it pretty professionally, with no hard feelings or anything like that. Perhaps that’s just me. Maybe I have skin so thick that I can’t sense any sarcasm or insults.

I also pitched my idea via Skype to Hiten Shah, co-founder of KISSMetrics, who told me to forget about that idea and focus on PO, which is exactly what I’m doing right now. I also gathered feedback from a lot of folks in Singapore before deciding what action to take. Anyway, I came back happy and I learned a ton. I was glad that they were cruel and honest about both myself and my product.

So that’s my little story. The lesson I learned is to listen to feedback and get the f*ck back to work.

It’s feedback. Take it (and work on it) or leave it – don’t try to fight against it (though constructive debate is fine, of course). And feedback here shouldn’t just be about the product, it should also cover the founder and his/her team. It’s the team, the people behind it, that really matter in a start-up. If the founders can’t take criticism and are unwilling to change accordingly, then he or she shouldn’t be in this space where we thrive on a quick feedback-and-pivot cycle.

That’s my two cents. Now, give me your feedback.

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