Photo by Vignesh Moorthy

In Be Good, Paul Graham talks about the unofficial Y Combinator motto:

“Make something people want”

This saying makes perfect sense, right? Of course, if you want to make something that people will pay for, you better make something that people want. It seems so obvious. How would you build a business on top of anything other than something that people want?

After starting and running Ask Inline over the past year, I’ve come to a different conclusion about the phrase “make something people want”. It has more meaning now than ever, but most of the value is in the fact that it’s incomplete. There’s more to the saying.

Why did YC leave their motto incomplete? Most likely because, at least to me, there are a half-dozen different ways to complete the motto.

Here are a few of the variations of “make something people want” that I’ve stumbled over.

Make something people know that they want

If you’ve ever started a company or a side project aimed at making money on the internet this is probably the variation of the phrase “make something people want” that you’ll bump your head on as you attempt to get distribution for what you’re building.

Why is “make something people know that they want” so obvious?

Because on the internet, getting distribution for something people know that they want is much easier than the alternative.

The internet is driven by search and people search for things that they want. Search is such a significant driver of online activity that if you build something that people aren’t searching for, you’ve got a much trickier problem. Suddenly you’ve got to go out and find people and teach them that they should want what you’ve got. Reaching out and educating people one at a time isn’t just a little harder and more expensive, companies that are sales driven end up charging orders of magnitude more than companies that are search driven.

If people aren’t searching for what you’re selling, you’ll struggle mightily to get distribution.

Make something small that people want

At the end of the day, YC is three months and some money. After that three months is up teams pitch to investors in the hopes of receiving additional funding. How much can you get done in three months?

More than you think.

Can you build the solution to the QA needs of enterprise companies?

No.

So what are you to do as a company like RainforesQA who is aiming to be the QA arm of any software team? You’ve got a big ass problem and only three months to solve it in.

Build something small that people want.

Hopefully that small thing is representative of the larger goal. Hopefully you’ve executed on the small solution so well that investors are willing to bet large sums of money on your ability to also execute on the larger goal.

This isn’t just good advice for teams joining an accelerator. You may not have investors whose money was given based on a timeline, but you are forgoing a salary. If you’re trying to self-fund or bootstrap a company, starting small helps to prove an idea. Start with a minimal

Make something passionate people want

Passionate people build communities.

Find a community, preferably one that you’re already a member of, and address a common pain point felt by that community. Communities offer a natural pool of people to interview about product ideas, sell to and hone marketing materials for.

While communities may discourage people from advertising or selling directly to the community, every sufficiently large community has products build on top of them eventually. Reddit spawned imgur, gyfcat and a half dozen smaller products. Indie Hackers, a community itself, got all of its early traffic from by creating content that Hacker News ate up. Flip, a marketplace for sneaker heads, was created after the founders recognized that the community around collecting and reselling sneakers was big enough to support a whole brand rather than existing as a tiny niche of Craigslist and eBay.

If the product is good, passionate people are exactly the kind that you want to attract. Why not just build for them to begin with?

Make something that a growing number of people want

Building into static or shrinking marketing is a non-starter unless you can use technology to upend some part of that market to create significant cost savings. Even then it’s hard. People pay for solutions to problems, not just cost savings.

Aim to build into a market that’s growing.

Building into a growing market means that an outside force, the growth of said market, is working in your favor. While you’re toiling away attempting to grow the number of people who know about you, the number of people who would benefit from knowing about you is also growing.

Build something people want

All of the above are more specific versions of the core saying. They are, to me, critical insights that I didn’t understand prior to starting and running something myself.

I hope they’re useful to a few others.