Thanks Vineesh for this insightful post.
Tips for creating a successful new online product
What to build
1. Build for someone specific: The worst possible market for a product is “small businesses on the web”.
2. Don’t be afraid of targeting a narrow niche: The smaller the niche, the lower the bar to success.
3. Solve a real problem that costs money: The easiest way to get someone to loosen their purse strings is to convince them that using your product will pay for itself.
How to build it
4. Test the market with a working prototype as soon as possible: Listen to your users — and, to do this, give them a chance to tell you.
5. Develop iteratively: Aim for the result of each iteration to be useful in and of itself, but keep each iteration as tiny as possible.
6. Get things right, and be decisive in correcting the wrongs: Don’t delay necessary change just because you’re already committed into a different direction.
7. Don’t spend the time correcting until you know what you’re aiming for: If you realise that you need to change the direction of the product significantly, figure out your new goals for before implementing the change.
8. Don’t let your programmers design the user interface: Make sure you have a gifted UI designer on your team.
Who to build it with
9. Make sure every member of the development team is passionate about the product: Build your product in-house, and make sure the team is fully bought into the concept and committed to make it a success.
10. Be sickeningly elitist about your development team and sickeningly inclusive about your users: It’s never the user’s fault, it’s always your product’s fault for not being clear and intuitive enough.
11. The best hiring strategy is to hire no one: You need to recruit a development team to work with you, not for you.
12. Include at least one target user on the development team: Survival is worth giving up equity to get a target user on your development team.
13. Ensure everyone on your development team understands the problem they’re solving: Embed your development team into the end-users’ environment — at least for a time.
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