Many founders seem to find writing one an insurmountable obstacle.
Hm, people seem to feel that way about writing “long” things in general, and I’ve always found that weird. For example, I’ve received “ugh, you want me to read all of that?” responses from multi-paragraph text messages before. When you actually think about how much time it takes, it isn’t that long, so maybe it’s the shock value, but that doesn’t feel like the right explanation either.
I don’t think I’m too strawmanny though, as the lame excuses I give seem widespread (even if not always articulated).
Hm, I agree. At least that it’s worth directly addressing the lame excuses due to them being widespread.
I agree maybe I should steelman the opposing arguments, though I don’t know how strong they are.
Even if they aren’t strong enough to win out, I think it’s useful to go through a longer, more thorough steelman for the purpose of educating + convincing the reader. Eg. I see the lean startup stuff + wide error bars stuff as the big counterpoints, and you only spent a few paragraphs talking about them. Well, it was actually a decent length relative to the overall length of your post, so maybe this point is tied to my other point about anti-conciseness.
As it happens I also had a poker software startup a few years ago
Cool! That makes sense about the software’s complexity. It’s difficult to have good estimates there. When I worked on Premium Poker Tools I spent a few weeks trying to estimate how long it’d take to complete my tasks. For a while I was doing good, but then there were some tasks where the complexity just spiraled out of control, which caused me to lose motivation and stop trying to estimate. Right now I’m really liking Basecamp’s idea of uphill vs downhill work as a substitute for estimating how much longer a task will take.
Thanks again for the detailed feedback. In practice I don’t think I’m going to improve this post further as I’ve spent far too much time on it already (I find assembling coherent thoughts painfully slow), but it’s useful for my future posts.
Hm, people seem to feel that way about writing “long” things in general, and I’ve always found that weird. For example, I’ve received “ugh, you want me to read all of that?” responses from multi-paragraph text messages before. When you actually think about how much time it takes, it isn’t that long, so maybe it’s the shock value, but that doesn’t feel like the right explanation either.
Hm, I agree. At least that it’s worth directly addressing the lame excuses due to them being widespread.
Even if they aren’t strong enough to win out, I think it’s useful to go through a longer, more thorough steelman for the purpose of educating + convincing the reader. Eg. I see the lean startup stuff + wide error bars stuff as the big counterpoints, and you only spent a few paragraphs talking about them. Well, it was actually a decent length relative to the overall length of your post, so maybe this point is tied to my other point about anti-conciseness.
Cool! That makes sense about the software’s complexity. It’s difficult to have good estimates there. When I worked on Premium Poker Tools I spent a few weeks trying to estimate how long it’d take to complete my tasks. For a while I was doing good, but then there were some tasks where the complexity just spiraled out of control, which caused me to lose motivation and stop trying to estimate. Right now I’m really liking Basecamp’s idea of uphill vs downhill work as a substitute for estimating how much longer a task will take.
Thanks again for the detailed feedback. In practice I don’t think I’m going to improve this post further as I’ve spent far too much time on it already (I find assembling coherent thoughts painfully slow), but it’s useful for my future posts.
Sure thing. That makes sense.