Stop Building The Wrong Product Righter, Build The Right Product
Building products people want to use is hard. There can be many reasons why you aren't getting customers' desired results. Maybe your problem is not you aren’t building the right product. Your problem is you are building the wrong product.
Building products people want to use is hard. There can be many reasons why you aren't getting customers' desired results. If you're making things that don't solve their problems or meet their needs, it won't matter how often you try to get them to use your product.
Your problem is not you aren’t building the right product. Your problem is you are building the wrong product.
Here are two main aspects that should always apply to make your time worth spending on your product:
You need to validate that the problem you are solving is a real problem.
The most important thing to do is to validate your product. You need to validate that the problem you are solving is a real problem.
For example, I started working on Web Highlights because of a problem. I consumed many articles on the web but couldn't structure them so that I could re-find the information when I needed it. I was looking for chrome extensions that enable me to highlight text on websites and access the highlights from anywhere. There are some, but none according to my needs. That's why I built my own product.
I loved it because it solved my problem.
It gave me confidence that there must be people having the same problem and needs. And it seems there are.
It's important to understand that a product is not the thing you build. A Product is a solution to a problem that your customer has.
Product Validation is simply determining whether you have a problem worth solving.
But, even solving your own problem doesn't mean that others face the same. You need to make sure that there is a market for your problem. Market validation is about understanding how big the market is, how much money you can make, and how to reach your customers.
People tend to think that they always have to invent something new compulsively. This idea is called "First-Mover-Advantage" which was introduced in a paper by Lieberman and Montgomery in 1988. But, in fact, often being a "first-mover" turns out to be a disadvantage for many startups.
Ten years later, the same authors published a new paper called "First-mover (dis) advantages" [Lieberman and Montgomery 1998], where they backed off many of their claims.
The problem with "First-Movers" is that they act in a market that is not validated yet. Furthermore, they pay the exploration costs and allow second movers to exploit their findings for free.
Here are some examples of companies that were not first movers:
- Google: Before Google, there were search engines such as Yahoo and Infoseek.
- Facebook: There were many other early movers on social networks like Friendster and MySpace.
- Slack: Not the first product in team communication
- Starbucks: There were a lot of places to buy coffee before the establishment of Starbucks.
The conclusion to be drawn from these findings is that your product does not have to solve a completely new problem. If there are already similar products, you can be sure that there is an existing market for your product. That guarantees you that you are building a product in a market that is already validated.
Learn from the hard work of the first-movers and set your product apart from others by being better. Don't reinvent the wheel. Make it better.
You need to validate that your solution actually solves the problem.
Once you know that you have found a problem worth solving ensure that your product solves the actual problem.
If you solve your own problem, you are lucky as it is easier to determine whether your product serves your needs to solve the problem. If you solve the problem of others make sure to receive customer feedback as soon as possible.
Customer feedback is your most valuable tool for building a product people want. The question you should be asking is: Are we going in the right direction? What do our customers like, what do they hate and what would they pay for?
There is one sticking point hidden in the last paragraph: In order to receive customer feedback, you must already have an existing MVP.
Honestly, when I started building Web Highlights during university, I didn't care about any single fact of this article. I was just a motivated young developer who wanted to build something cool to solve my problem. But I have done something very important which has cost me some overcoming: I simply published my product in the Chrome Web Store.
I don't remember exactly what my product looked like back then. Nevertheless, I'm sure it wouldn't have won any award. I just published it and waited.
If you’re not embarrassed by your first release, you’ve launched too late. — Reid Hoffman
In the end, it was a fine line between a product with almost 4,000 users and a side project rotting somewhere on Github. And who knows how many potentially great products are rotting there? Don't make the same mistake and dare.
If you can’t do this, it’s not worth spending more time working on your product.
If you don’t want to directly publish your product, show it to friends, family, or co-workers. Once you published your product, make sure that users can provide customer feedback as easily as possible.
“Make it easy for them by making sure there is a feedback email address or phone number in an obvious place in your product and/ or by using tools such as ZenDesk, Groove, and Get Satisfaction to manage communication with your users”. — Hello, Startup by Yevgeniy Brikman
Final Thoughts
The key takeaway is that product validation is the most important step in the entire process. It's not just about building a product. It's about building something people want and need. To validate that your product solves the problem, make sure to receive customer feedback as early as possible.