Something I have been saying for a long time now is how the Web World is a guessing game. The same thing can be applied to many other occupations. Facebook, Twitter, and so many other "start ups" that have succeeded in becoming a house hold name in the beginning had no idea if they would be viral.
Facebook had a humble beginning that lead to a insanely addicting social network that allows you to connect with everyone you know and their trash cans. Twitter provides us with a 140 characters or less thoughts. Which is nice as Facebook friends to give us WAY to many details about their lives.
Suddenly with these two start ups they created a new fad. Status updates!
What does this all mean? Basically they chimed in on what they thought to be a "hole" in the market. This hole they filled or rather created. By filling this hole that they created they started to see how successful the product that they had created was.
So here are a few tips when thinking up new products.
- Does the product already exist?
- IF it exists can it be done better? Or can I take a percentage of the market share?
- What will the product do that people will "need" to use this daily.
When Developing the product realize these few things:
- Product development is a guessing game. When someone provides metrics for SEO, how people will react, what people will do with your product just remember ITS TRIAL AND ERROR.
- Try to make it as simple as possible. With Web I always say, "You have less than a minute to win it." If its not blantently obvious from the beginning you just lost a sale. Facebook can be all that they are as they have already reeled people in like crack cocane. You haven't made the deal yet... And have to prove yourself addicting first.
- Don't start to big... Think about how Twitter is... Start small and work to a larger size. After all you don't know how people will react to the product. It could fail quickly or succeed fast because of simplicity.
- Think additions... When developing the product make sure you can upgrade it as time goes on. The old world model built its platforms on a none flexible unit. Which now a result of this is developers are having to redo a lot of work on an old platform.
So with these ideas in mind be open to change. TechCrunch recently had an article that explained this really well.. Are You Building the Right Product?
Here are some of my favorite points from the article:
1)
Visionaries are right. Customers don’t know what they want. There’s plenty of good psychology research that shows that people are not able to accurately predict how they would behave in the future. So asking them, “Would you buy my product if it had these three features?” or “How would you react if we changed our product this way?” is a waste of time. They don’t know.
2)
But imagine a physicist who told you science was impossible because you can’t ask electrons what they want. You’d laugh in his or her face. Science works by conducting experiments that reveal how the world actually works.
3)
Science requires having a prediction, a hypothesis, about what will happen—based on theory, a set of assumptions. We need that prediction so that we can compare it to the actual results of our experiment. That’s one of the reasons why vision is so critical to startups. We need to be able to predict what customers are supposed to do when they encounter our product.
What I gathered from this is that its important to evaluate the success measurements correctly. Checking impressions, clicks, etc... May not be the best measurement as these could be recorded way higher. But instead figuring out how long something takes to accomplish. Can it be done in 1-3 actions? Or does it take 10 actions? Using science to figure out if the vision is correct is always going to be a valid option here.
Visionaries are the start, but what validates the validity of the vision is science. You can have a vision, but if its not tried and tested properly you could have a bad product.
Finally I recommend that with having a Vision for a product make sure you have good science to back it up. Generally a good product developer, or in this websites case a good "Web Developer." As then most the science behind a vision will follow as it should be in their blood anyways as to what will work.
