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Ask HN: How do you market a new app that's adaptable, like a web browser is?
Along with the web browser, the other examples of adaptable tools I think of are text editors and terminals. These are tools that aren't designed to solve any one problem, instead they can shape themselves to solve many problems.
Traditional product development says to know your customer, and what their problem is, and then create a product for them that solves that problem. But you don't get products like web browsers, terminals, and text editors through that process.
There's one obvious answer: That when you launch your product, you focus on a single problem, and a single type of user. Which is what I've tried to do. There are some benefits to this approach. It certainly makes some conversations easier. But it also simultaneously has a negative effect, in that it ends up making the product seem less magical, and correspondingly it's harder to tap into my own enthusiasm for the product when I'm so focused on one use case.
To me, web browsers, terminals, and text editors are special. Because they're so adaptable, they become less of just a solution to a problem I'm currently solving, and more of a part of my identity. Something feel I can bring with me to any problem I might be trying to solve. I've tried to design a new tool that I feel the same way about.
I'm wondering if there's a way of tapping into my own, and what I hope is others, interest in open-ended tools like these. Perhaps in addition to focusing on one specific use case, or maybe even instead of?
One interesting thought experiment might be: If a web browser, a terminal, or text editor didn't exist today, then how would you market them?
- dsr_ 7y agoFor each of these examples, we can go back to the actual time when the product category didn't exist, and ask how they were introduced. Before video-display terminals, there were teletype terminals. A VDT was faster at displaying information, could be addressed randomly in a 2D matrix, and didn't run out of paper. Before text editors, there were line editors, and before line editors, there were card stacks. Before web browsers, we had GOPHER, and FTP, and TELNET. When I first saw a web browser, I dismissed it as an extravagant way of navigating GOPHERspace. So: what's the predecessor for your invention, and what are the improvements that your invention offers? Make them obvious enough, and you'll have a hit.
- robenkleene 7y agoLove this approach. I tried my best to summarize what each of those apps improved on when they first appeared below: Like a teletype, but it doesn't need paper. Like a line editor, but you can see all of your text at once. Like a gopher, but with better multimedia. For my own product, this gives me: like a web browser, but with its own local apps. Which seems pretty decent?
- dsr_ 7y agoWell, maybe. Right now we have webapps like Google Docs, where you get a clean copy of the update application, the data is handled on someone else's computer, and you can copy it locally or load it from local storage. Is this better than that?
- robenkleene 7y agoI'm not sure, to be honest. Google Docs local technology feels more like something made to supplement their online web apps. What I'm making is for more for local apps that don't have an online component. I guess that's the distinction, and it seems that a different set of uses cases emerge from that focus. To give an example, would you use the Chrome app technology Google Docs uses to install a web-base Git client? That particular example gets covered by Electron, which I also have overlap with. But Electron feels heavy for a lot of uses cases. This is why I always come back to text editors, web browsers, and terminals, these are all apps where people make a host of small customizations to fit their needs, I want an app like that that's based on a web rendering engine (and that isn't already a text editor or a terminal like VS Code or Hyper). I.e., what I'm making is more something you'd rig up to solve your problems by installing some plugins and customizations rather than a full-blown app development platform like Electron or Chrome apps.