这是我第一次独立翻译国外知名博客的文章，在翻译的过程中我要感谢helen(she is my english teacher)、yuyang、michael对我的帮助，虽然在此过程中我尽了最大努力来表述作者的真实想法，但其中必定某些句子和作者本意想表达的相差甚远，如有此类问题请留言告知我，谢谢。

该文章的作者名叫Paul Buchheit，他是一个Gmail的创始者，离开google以后创建了名叫Firendfeed的项目。

在该篇文章中他所表达的意思大致为：聪明的团队，杰出的设计和复杂的算法不能造就一个成功的创业公司和一个好的产品，因为这些并不一定是用户需要的。他认为可以先上线，然后通过用户的反馈来不停的完善

原文地址：http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/02/most-import-thing-to-understand-about.html

国内的某些读者可能无法打开该链接，为了方便大家，在本文最下面我提供了Paul Buchheit英文全文。

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首先，从Marc Andressen的《创业指南：第四部分：唯一重要的事情》文章中引用一些文字。

"
如果你问企业家或一些风险投资人关于团队、产品、市场哪个最重要的问题，他们大部分会告诉你团队是最重要的。
.....
就我而言，我将阐述三个观点：我敢断言在关乎创业的成败问题上，市场是最重要的因素。

为什么呢？

在一个巨大的市场里有大量的潜在用户没有发现，这个时候创业来自于市场的驱动。

这个市场被拓展和市场将要被开拓取决于第一个效益好的产品出现。

这个产品并不需要很强大，只需要有基本的功能即可，另外市场也不需要有多么优秀的团队，只要这个团队可以开发出符合要求的产品就可以。

相反的，在一个竞争激烈的市场中，你必须拥有世界上最好的产品和最优秀的团队，如果什么都没有的话，你将走向失败。"

Mark写的这篇文章并没有马上让我产生共鸣，因为他的观点和我想的有些不同，毕竟，如果没有人想要你的产品怎么能叫做强大，如果你的团队坚持做的事情没有人喜欢，你的团队怎么能叫做优秀？

自从那时起,他的主要观点就一直留在我的脑海深处。因而，我总是不断的提醒自己它是如何的重要，我也经常看到很多人抓不住它的精髓所在。

在我的观念里，真正的有两点。
1、你要拥有最聪明，最有经验、广阔的人脉关系、富有才气的人在这个世界上，他们会创造出极高设计和技术水平的产品在这个世界上，但是如果不是人们想要的，那么你将会失败。举个例子：segway身上发生的状况就能证明了这点。

或许这看起来让人沮丧，毕竟，如果很聪明的一群人又有所有想要的资源最后做的东西却失败了，那我们其余的人还有什么希望？也许成功需要运气，也许创业成功比买彩票更难。

虽然我不相信这是真的，还有一种乐观的方式可以了解我的第一点，那就是我的第二点是：即使你周围没有优秀的人才，你的产品又不是很完善，你仍然可以很成功，前提是你建立的产品是正确的。YouTube 和 MySpace都是很好的证明。

如果你的团队是非常杰出的，为什么不能做个好产品呢？很简单，他们的态度错了。他们只是从他们的经验出发，工程师觉得他们的花架子技术和画蛇添足的工程可以带来成功(问候一下Google)，设计师觉得美工一定要华而不实才是最美的，自作聪明的MBA们觉得认得的同行多，风险投资者多，玩玩电子表格，幻灯就能OK了。如果你拥有很多明特别特别聪成功的人才，那么这个问题将会变得更坏。因为这样的团队会变得自负和自大。而他们并不会对自己的行为和能力表示过任何怀疑。

我们很容易举出这种错误态度的例子出来，当GOOGLE收购YouTube后，公司里的很多人都很吃惊，“他们有技术能力吗？”，他们并不明白不是单单有技术才能做出好产品的。不能把优先搞错了。

我有规律的去研究Facebook、Myspace等受人欢迎的站点，相同的是，人们经常抱怨Myspace和GOOGLE的实际很烂，再之前，他们有足够多的设计师(也许这些设计师都很不错)在为他们工作。

什么是正确的态度呢？谦虚 。这和你是否聪明、成功与否和是否够资格是没有关系的，如果你只是不知道在做什么，好在其他人也没有做到 ，虽然有些人仍然愚蠢的认为他们已经这么做了(这就是为什么你能打败他们)。

什么是产品设计时的谦虚的态度呢？多留意。注意哪些有效，哪些无效。反复试验，提出你的问题，谨记在很多事情上你都是错的，抓住时机，放弃你狂妄势力的技术和设计理念，无论它们多么，多么重要。

Myspace是一个很好的例子，我十分肯定他们的个性化页面的布局是一个失误，他们不知道如何正确的回避那些用户放在他们空间首页的text,以至于使得用户可以把一些html 和css 代码包含在他们的页面里。这是一个常见的错误，大多数人会将它作为常见的问题改掉它（好的程序员不会有这样的错误，在第一步就会规避掉）。但他们做了一件很聪明的事情，他们把这个缺陷当成一个功能交给用户来维护，虽然很多用户页面很难看，但它却极受欢迎。

除了MySpace外，其他还有很多这样偶然的发明，但最重要的是我们要明白，这种“偶然”并不是靠运气，很多偶然就在我们身边，只要我们仔细观察。
做一个互联网在线产品，有一个很重要的技巧：尽可能快的发布产品并提供用户使用，你就可以最快的时间里验证你的想法是否可以行，并进行改善。

我写的第一版本的Gmail发布的那一天并没有让人留下很深刻的印象，它的功能仅仅是在Google公司内部可以搜索我自己的电子邮件，我把它让很少的几个人使用，他们说这有一点用，如果它也可以搜索他们的电子邮件就更好了，这个就是第二个版本。之后，一些愿意反馈信息的人想用电子邮件的形式进行反馈，于是第三个版就出现了。在GOOGLE内部运行的过程中一对夫妇也加入了进来，几年后Gmail才在世界范围内提供服务。

创业公司刚开始并没有几百个人的内部用户，所以你必须把产品很快的发布出去。我们在去年10月份发布了"FriendFeed"的半成品的版本，从有想法到发布只用了2个月(Bret和Jim编写了其中99.9%的代码)，从那时起，我们已经作了很多的改良，而且今天我们所拥有的产品要远优于我们所应有的产品，如果当初我们没有发行的话。为什么？ 我们拥有用户，我们倾听他们的声音，我们清楚哪些事情有用，哪些事情没用。

找到诉求 然后紧随

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我的读后观感：

我们读文章需要吸收作者一些好的地方，但绝不能盲从，因为作为bloger，他大部分时候是站在自己的角度上来看待一切，这种主观的见解并不是对所有人都适用，Paul Buchheit某些观点太过绝对，这种快速开发一切为了满足用户需求的观点在某些领域的某些阶段适用，对于创新特别是商业模式上的创新则很多时候就是要思考缜密行动缜密，过程要逐渐深入、来改变这个行业以及用户对这种商业模式的认知度。当然我的这些见解也是基于我的角度来说的。

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在翻译的过程中我逐渐明白，翻译是一件不简单的工作，并不是我当初想象的按词逐句翻译成中文意思就可以了，你需要揣摩整篇文章想表达的意思，并逐句揣摩每句话作者想表达的意境，最好可以把作者文笔的风格用中文展示给读者，所以翻译是一件很难的事情，在此向诸多翻译工作者表示敬意。

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英文原文如下：

First, a quote from Marc Andreessen's "Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters"

If you ask entrepreneurs or VCs which of team, product, or market is most important, many will say team.
...
Personally, I'll take the third position -- I'll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure.

Why?

In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup.

The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along.

The product doesn't need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn't care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product.
...
Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn't matter -- you're going to fail.

Mark's blog post did not immediately resonate with me, because his terms are somewhat different from the way I think. After all, how great is your product if nobody wants it? How great is your team if they persist in building something that nobody wants?

However, his main point has stayed in the back of my mind since then, and I'm continually reminded of how important it is, and how often I see people who clearly don't get it.

In my mind, there's really two points. One: You can take the smartest, most experienced, most connected, most brilliant people in the world and have them build the most stunningly designed and technically advanced product in the world, but if people don't want it, then you will fail. This is roughly what happened with the Segway, for example.

Perhaps that seems a little discouraging. After all, if really smart people with all the right resources can fail, then what hope is there for the rest of us? Perhaps success is random, and maybe startups are more like the lottery than we'd like to admit.

I don't believe that's true though. There is an optimistic way of understanding my first point, and that's my second point: Even if you aren't the smartest person around, and your product is kind of ugly and broken, you can still be very successful, if you just build the right product. YouTube and MySpace are both fine examples of this.

But if your team is so great, why aren't they building the right product? Simply put, they have the wrong attitude. Firstly, they overestimate the importance of their own skills. Engineers think that success is all about fancy technology and complex engineering (hello Google). Designers think that success is all about beautiful design. MBAs think that success is all about knowing the right people, or spreadsheets, or something. If you have especially smart or successful people, then this problem could be even worse, because then the team is also likely to be arrogant and overconfident, which makes them less likely to question these assumptions or the value of their own skills.

It's easy to find examples of this wrong attitude. When Google acquired YouTube, many people inside the company were flabbergasted, "But they have no technology!?" They didn't understand that you only need enough technology to make the product work. Any more and you probably have the wrong priorities. I regularly see similar complaints about Facebook, MySpace, and a lot of other popular sites. Similarly, people will often complain that MySpace or even Google has "no design" or "bad design". Again, they have enough design (or the right design) to work for their users.

So what's the right attitude? Humility. It doesn't matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don't know what you're doing. The good news is that nobody else does either, though some are foolish enough to think that they do (and that's why you can beat them).

What is the humble approach to product design? Pay attention. Notice which things are working and which aren't. Experiment and iterate. Question your assumptions. Remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. Watch for the signals. Lose your technical and design snobbery. Whatever works, works.

MySpace is a great example of this. I'm pretty sure that their custom profile page layouts were an accident. They didn't know enough to properly escape the text that people put on their profiles, and that allowed their users to start including arbitrary html and css in their pages. This is a common bug, and most people would have fixed the bug and that would have been the end of it (really great engineers wouldn't have had the bug in the first place). But they did something smarter. They noticed that the feature was popular and found a way to preserve it. The result is mostly ugly, but it's extremely popular.

There are many other accidental inventions besides MySpace, but it's important to understand that "accidental" isn't the same as "random". There are clues all around us, we just need to watch more closely.

For web based products at least, there's another very powerful technique: release early and iterate. The sooner you can start testing your ideas, the sooner you can start fixing them.

I wrote the first version of Gmail in one day. It was not very impressive. All I did was stuff my own email into the Google Groups (Usenet) indexing engine. I sent it out to a few people for feedback, and they said that it was somewhat useful, but it would be better if it searched over their email instead of mine. That was version two. After I released that people started wanting the ability to respond to email as well. That was version three. That process went on for a couple of years inside of Google before we released to the world.

Startups don't have hundreds of internal users, so it's important to release to the world much sooner. When FriendFeed was semi-released (private beta) in October, the product was only about two months old (and 99.9% written by two people, Bret and Jim). We've made a lot of improvements since then, and the product that we have today is much better than what we would have built had we not launched. The reason? We have users, and we listen to them, and we see which things work and which don't.

Find the gradient, then follow it.