Or did the Beatles mean ‘users’?

Paul Graham in his most recent essay talks about the failure of the Segway. While the Segway has always given geeks wet dreams (Did you know it has 15 gyroscopes? Gasp!), it’s never really taken off in the commercial sense. Paul Graham attributes it to the fact that you look dorky; you look elitist; and you look lazy when you use one. This in turn, is caused by the fact that Segway were so well funded right from the start that it did need to be open and did not need to talk to actual users and it did not have to iterate over failed designs.

Which is a decent segue (excuse the pun) to the notion of openness of startups: how open must startups be? Or rather how involved must users be in the evolution of a startup? There are many startups, (especially in the post dot-com-bust phase), who are very open about their design process. FriendFeed even (or rather used to, I just realized they aren’t very active with it now) posts changelogs of their core product source code so that users can get a feel for FriendFeed’s evolution. FriendFeed founders are incredibly approachable people as well and they are always engaging users in constructive discussion over how the product must evolve.

But must that be the golden path for all startups? Apple have taken the opposite path and have cultivated a cult of secrecy to become almost fashionable – Apple being one of the very few technology companies from Silicon Valley to not embrace blogs or Twitter. It took a Senior Editor at Forbes to blog on the Apple CEO’s behalf.

It becomes very easy for entrepreneurs who are a little green behind the ears, to take the user’s word as gospel and change the direction of the product based on the opinions of some users. Or an even more dangerous path for a startup founder to take is to try and please all kinds of users, when the right response must be ‘Sorry, maybe you aren’t our kinda user’.

The best way (as always) seems to be a middle path and to not ape any approach but pick one which suits you best. Paul Buchheit (who created GMail and is one of the founders of FriendFeed) sums it up best, when he says that it’s not just enough to listen to users, but to understand why they are saying it – so I will leave you to watch this video (from Startup School 2008)