How most people think successful products are built –
- Think hard and come up with revolutionary idea
- Hire well rounded team to execute
- Build complete, well-designed product
- Get a ton of users to discover your product through press coverage and “social media”
- Raise money and hire more talent
- Media, money & large team will auto-magically mean ever growing users & product usage
- Start charging for product or put ads to generate revenue
How successful products are actually built –
- Identify real burning problem of target user group
- Connect the dots and formulate your hypothesis of what a good solution to the problem would be
- Validate hypothesis & build on it through observation and feedback from users who have skin in the game (pre-selling)
- Build the core of a solution that delivers enough value for which users are happy to pay
- Iterate on v1 to achieve strong product-market fit
- Continue developing deep understanding of the domain, user problems, and keep experimenting towards building a world-class, successful product