4 ms·

Additional ideas: - There are some showstoppers that apply to all products: Reliability, security, trust, ease of use, speed, customer support. - To find game

by aytekin 13y ago

Additional ideas: - There are some showstoppers that apply to all products: Reliability, security, trust, ease of use, speed, customer support. - To find gamechangers you need to think outside the box. Most people accept things as they are. Most people run away from schlep work. The only way to find gamechangers is to question everything and add a question mark when you find yourself saying "that's not possible".

nostrademons 13y ago
I'm not sure that it's actually true that showstoppers apply to all products. Reliability and security, for example, are not showstoppers for Zynga games. Security evidently was not a showstopper for Microsoft. Customer support is not a showstopper for Google. Speed is not a showstopper for Gumbo (the HTML5 parsing library I just released). Remember that a showstopper is defined as "Something that will prevent a customer from buying your project." Sure, reliability, security, trust, ease of use, speed, and customer support are always nice to have. But part of building a startup on limited resources is knowing what's nice to have and what will prevent a customer from buying, and not spending resources on the former. You can always go back and fix the nice-to-haves later when you have more resources; you can't go back and resuscitate a company that runs out of money.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  This gets to the whole issue of "product/market" fit. For some hypothetical market, security is a show-stopper: Eg, there are people who chose not to use Windows largely based on security concerns. So for any combination of product attributes, you appeal to some market of size n, and are unappealing to some other market of size z. The question is how do you build a product for which n is sufficiently large, acknowledging that you can't satisfy everybody at the same time. Expanding beyond just product attributes, this whole discussion aligns with the thinking from The Discipline of Market Leaders which talks about how you can choose to construct your value proposition based on optimizing one of three possible axes (where product excellence is one), while striving for merely "acceptable" on the other two. Since different markets will purchase based on different value propositions, the important thing (or so the authors argue) is just that you be really good at one of the three, and just good enough at the others.
  - aytekin 13y ago
    Just started reading "The Discipline of Market Leaders", and it seems to be a great book I've never heard before. Thanks for the recommendation.
    - mindcrime 13y ago
      Cool, I hope you find it helpful. I only just discovered it recently as well, and haven't even finished reading it all the way through. But my initial impression is very favourable and I suspect that TDOML will become a "go to" book for me, much like The Four Steps To The Epiphany.
badclient 13y ago
Gamechanger is also where bulk of the risk lies. What most start ups build as gamechangers often end up being features their market doesn't care about. This is why if you build a me-too product in a great market you can get quicker initial adoption than building supposed gamechangers in an unestablished market.

by aytekin 13y ago

nostrademons 13y ago

I'm not sure that it's actually true that showstoppers apply to all products. Reliability and security, for example, are not showstoppers for Zynga games. Security evidently was not a showstopper for Microsoft. Customer support is not a showstopper for Google. Speed is not a showstopper for Gumbo (the HTML5 parsing library I just released). Remember that a showstopper is defined as "Something that will prevent a customer from buying your project." Sure, reliability, security, trust, ease of use, speed, and customer support are always nice to have. But part of building a startup on limited resources is knowing what's nice to have and what will prevent a customer from buying, and not spending resources on the former. You can always go back and fix the nice-to-haves later when you have more resources; you can't go back and resuscitate a company that runs out of money.

mindcrime 13y ago
This gets to the whole issue of "product/market" fit. For some hypothetical market, security is a show-stopper: Eg, there are people who chose not to use Windows largely based on security concerns. So for any combination of product attributes, you appeal to some market of size n, and are unappealing to some other market of size z. The question is how do you build a product for which n is sufficiently large, acknowledging that you can't satisfy everybody at the same time. Expanding beyond just product attributes, this whole discussion aligns with the thinking from The Discipline of Market Leaders which talks about how you can choose to construct your value proposition based on optimizing one of three possible axes (where product excellence is one), while striving for merely "acceptable" on the other two. Since different markets will purchase based on different value propositions, the important thing (or so the authors argue) is just that you be really good at one of the three, and just good enough at the others.
- aytekin 13y ago
  Just started reading "The Discipline of Market Leaders", and it seems to be a great book I've never heard before. Thanks for the recommendation.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    Cool, I hope you find it helpful. I only just discovered it recently as well, and haven't even finished reading it all the way through. But my initial impression is very favourable and I suspect that TDOML will become a "go to" book for me, much like The Four Steps To The Epiphany.

badclient 13y ago

Gamechanger is also where bulk of the risk lies. What most start ups build as gamechangers often end up being features their market doesn't care about. This is why if you build a me-too product in a great market you can get quicker initial adoption than building supposed gamechangers in an unestablished market.