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