Let's back 3 weeks ago when I had a chit-chat with a founder.
She wanted to build a successful product. She wanted to build something people want.
"How?" She asked me. "How can I build a successful product?"
"I dunno," I said. "But, gimme some times. I’ll back to you with an answer."
“A successful product…” I thought
For answering this question, we need to change our mindset. And sometimes it’s simple as changing the words.
Success is a vague word, don't you think so? Let's use marketable instead.
So, how can you build a marketable product? What the heck is the marketable product?
I got my hands dirty. I started researching about Uber.
"What are they doing?" I asked.
"They made it easy for people to move around the city," Google answered.
"Cool, what about the internet?" I asked. "Why it’s so popular?"
"The Internet made it easy for people to connect with each other," Google answered.
"Ummm...what about Electricity?" I typed.
"It makes our lives significantly easier. For example, we don't have to walk to a river to get water and we can cook food by switching a button," Google replied.
"Hmmm, interesting..." I said.
And I drowned in my thoughts. Some questions stuck in my head.
What all of the game-changing innovations have in common? How can we build something that people want? How can we build a marketable product?
The story of two apps
It was April 2020 — Covid-19 quarantine.
So, we needed to completely move from the offline to the online world.
Buying groceries online and working remotely become the new norm.
There were two websites for food delivery. One of them was my go-to place to buy groceries and one of my most-loved e-commerce. And what about the other one? Well…I visited that site just one time.
Why? Let me tell you the story.
Build something for lazy people - literally everyone!
Using the first app was a no-brainer. Whenever I landed on their site, they showed the most popular items right away - the things people buy often.
I didn't need to go to any other pages to find must-needed products.
The signup process was a breeze. You just need to enter your phone number and they'll send the password.
Do you think this is amazing? So, wait until I tell you about the checkout process.
You don't need to write your address. You just need to turn on the GPS and Voila! The website will find your location and then you can pay with Google/Apple Pay.
Easy-peasy!
This is how buying online should be, am I right?
But there was a problem
I wanted Pretzel. And it wasn't available on this website.
So, for the first time (and last time) I visited the other website.
In the first section, there was a big slideshow. They were shouting at me, "Here our shiny stuff, buy it NOW."
But I didn't need any of those crap. I didn't care about the new version of their damn app. I wanted a Pretzel.
Finally, I found my Pretzel, then they ask me to sign up.
"Okay," I said.
They showed me a form, a very long one. What things did they ask me?
They wanted my name, my phone number, my email, a password, they wanted me to verify the password and verifying I'm a human.
"Dammit!"
I closed the tab. I had a ton of other stuff to do. And I never come back to that website.
Magic? Nope, it's called simplicity
Do you know about system 1 and system 2? The terms coined by Daniel Kahneman? System 1 is automatic thinking and system 2 is the analytical method of thinking.
Making things easier, then you can build an intuitive product.
By minimizing frictions, making decisions will be so easy that will lead to forming a habit — an automatic task. This is when system 1 takes charge of decisions.
So, people automatically will use your product over and over again.
Don't believe me?
Take look at Amazon, Airbnb, Facebook, Twitter, and Uber. There's a high chance using these products is already one of your habits, isn’t it?
So, how can you make things easier?
Do market and qualitative research. Talk to potential customers (including people who already using a product). Write a competitor analysis.
Find a gap in the market. What’s the common problem of people? What the thing that all of the solutions out there are missing? What are the frictions and pain points of current solutions? What’s a more ambitious version of the current products?
Just do it. Remove those frictions. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Build something new and marketable on top of the current products.
Yup, that’s all folks. It’s simple, yet hard.
Wanna stay ahead of in business? Makin' things easier.
You Rock! 🤘
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