Each chapter is made up of essays whose titles complete the following:
Under no circumstances should you...

Chap 3 - Building Product - Thursday, August 27, 2009 10:03 - Comments

…Not Solve A Real Problem

“What’s it good for?” “So?” “And?…” Get used to hearing those questions. In venturing off on your own, there’s a chance you are going to be creating a new product or service that the world has never seen. As with anything, there are varying degrees to which there is newness to what you have created. There’s the product which is an improvement over an existing idea, but is novel or new enough that you could make claims that it is new. There is also the product which is so completely new as to require an explanation as to what it is or what its use is.

Marginal improvements over existing products can be very useful in the marketplace. They can help solve an old problem in a more efficient way. They can also add needless complexity to an already sublime product, yielding a new product which falls short of its predecessor. That’s the risk associated with a marginal improvement over an existing product. What exactly is the improvement, and is the product space ultimately better for it? The litmus test for that question is whether or not your competitors will immediately copy what you have done.

Completely new products are a mixed bag. Paul Graham is attributed with the following statement: “make something people want.” It’s a terribly simple, and terribly powerful concept which, unfortunately, is overlooked far more often that it is yielded. This is the burden you will bear should you endeavor to build a completely never been seen before product. Not only will you have to spend a bunch of time explaining it to people who don’t get it (and there will be plenty of those), but you will have all of the insecurity associated with thinking that you are perpetrating some terrible act of hubris to believe that you could come up with this idea when no one else has done so before you.

Continue Reading…