There's an interesting discussion to be had here about what are the things exactly that influence "product DNA". I'm guessing it's mostly... founder personality? And what their priorities are?

The best way to meet people is to look for activity groups, meetups and so on. People with common interests. I'd even argue that this is actually a better way to find romantic partners, than to signal "I am looking for a romantic partner" (unless you're above-average in attractiveness).

Why is that? Even Elon Musk spends times with his kids. What's keeping you from spending time with people you care about?

People use mental models and heuristics and metaphors to make sense of all sorts of things. Very smart people do this, too.

Simplified maps can have their uses, even when you might personally be comfortable with a more complicated one.

It's not about the skills required to make a t-shirt or app. Consumers don't care about that. All they care about is whether or not they're going to be using it. I'm usually hesitant to pay for apps because I don't know if I'm going to use them more than a couple of times. (Exception: I paid like $100 for Things 2 and 3, after using them during the free trial and realizing I loved them and was going to keep using them. And I have.)

It's easy to look at a t-shirt and think "Oh golly, I'm going to wear this all the time!"

Another really common reason people buy t-shirts is as gifts. I wonder if there's any corollary to that in the app world. Can people buy apps as gifts for friends? People will definitely spend ~$10 to send a friend a download link to gag app that mocks them, I bet.

Steve Yegge's famous essay covers it quite well, I think: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

> So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

  1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

  2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

  3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed:  no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever.  The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

  4) It doesn't matter what technology they use.  HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter.  Bezos doesn't care.

  5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable.  That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world.  No exceptions.

  6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

  7) Thank you; have a nice day!

– https://www.wired.com/1996/02/jobs-2/