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Product design.md

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Product design

  • Sales is talking to a small number of people who are seriously interested in the product you're building. Marketing is talking to a broad audience that is generally indifferent. They're two ends of a spectrum.
  • Unless you are in one of the winner-takes-all markets (e.g. social networks), focus on the product first and only then on growth. Talk to early adopters individually and shape your product. If you fail to do so by advertising a mediocre product, you will not only have unsustainable growth (or none at all), but you will never get the feedback that you need to improve the product. You will have fewer users than expected and be blind to all your product's shortcomings.
  • "Focusing on the problem you want to solve will keep you from getting blinded by your enthusiasm for a single solution." (hatchery.io)
  • "Requiring login or account creation too early in a site experience can be detrimental to conversion. [...] Before offering their personal information, users want to browse content and get a sense of what a site has to offer." (Pete LePage)
  • "Offer the option to check out as a guest, and encourage registration with tangible benefits." (Pete LePage)
  • "[T]he effort required to design something is inversely proportional to the simplicity of the result." (Roy T. Fielding)
  • "Above all else, align with customers. Win when they win. Win only when they win." (Jeff Bezos)
  • "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." (Steve Jobs)
  • "I've been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume that what designers do is decoration. Good design is problem solving." (Jeffery Veen)
  • "Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service." (Steve Jobs)
  • "Visual appearance is one of the most effective variables for quickly differentiating one application from another." (Bob Baxley)
  • "As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product." (Jef Raskin)
  • "When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." (Richard Buckminster Fuller)
  • "The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak." (Hans Hofmann)
  • "One of the things I've learned is that every time you offer a choice, you paralyse some people who can't decide if that's what they want to do or not. [...] It's the 'Paradox of Choice', the jam experiment -- you put strawberry, apricot and blackberry jam in the supermarket aisle and you can persuade half the people coming down the aisle to taste the jam and maybe buy one. But if you decide to add lemon, orange, blueberry and grapefruit, by adding the choices you don't increase the number of people choosing one, but in fact you go the other way. Fewer people choose anything at all." (Neil Hunt)
  • "Things are packages of emphasis. Some things are emphasized in a product, some things are not done as well in a product, some things are chosen not to be done at all in a product. And so different people make different choices." (Steve Jobs)

Growth

  • User retention is always more important than virality and fast user acquisition. You can pour a lot of water into a leaky bucket and it won't really fill. But as soon as you have mended the holes, the bucket will be filling gradually. Thus focus on retention first and foremost, which will result in sustainable growth and make all subsequent efforts more efficient. You just have to pour in enough water to find out all the leaks.
  • At the early stage of your business, start small and narrow: Do sales, not marketing. Talk to a small number of users only. This is invaluable market research that helps you find product/market fit. And you can ... enough power to reach out to a broader audience. Airbnb started by meeting with its first hosts personally, teaching them about the product and even being referred to potential new hosts, who they met in person as well. Stripe signed up its first users manually and installed the product for them. Pinterest began by recruiting users manually as well, going into cafes in Palo Alto and asking random people to try out Pinterest while gathering feedback over their shoulders.

Validating your business ideas (online)

Test whether there exists a certain problem and you have the solution that your target audience is willing to pay for. Don't ask your target audience what they want. You have to know what they might want and validate that idea.

Four simple steps (hatchery.io):

  1. Talk to your potential customers about the problem in an informal setting and ask: "I believe [target group] has a problem/need achieving [goal] because [problem/need]. By [solution] we will help them to [benefit]. We will offer the solution for [pricing]. Are you interested?"
  2. Put together a landing page for the product that does not even exist yet and advertise it online, e.g. via Google AdWords. Just see if people are interested and perhaps get some email addresses of people who want to be notified on product launch.
  3. Built a minimum viable product (MVP): Offer your audience the solution they expected in the most simple and basic form that is possible.
  4. Get valuable insights, talk to your audience again and again, and find product/market fit — or dismiss your idea.

Always remember:

  • Throughout the process, question hard whether the people you talk to are really representative of your target audience and whether they are willing and able to pay for it.
  • If you can't get anybody to give you an email address, then you'll never get them to give you any money.