I know you may have come across lot of videos, articles and other resources explaining what makes a product great. But does only building a product with lots of features help? Let us try to find how great products find their target customers.
Let us start first of all with the problem. I know this may sound cliched but great problem makes product great. Just like an antagonist makes the protagonist in a movie shine more. If you are really looking to solve a burning problem then there is a chance that your product may grow initially by word of mouth marketing (of course the product has to be good).
What I have found is that most of the problems are related to time, money or productivity. If you really want to brainstorm product ideas then work towards identifying issues that a particular niche of people are encountering with respect to time and money. E.g. – Shopify solved a problem of providing of platform for businesses to build their custom ecommerce websites.
But merely solving the problem makes your product great? I do not think so because the nature of problems keeps on changing. For Shopify although merchants were able to build their websites, there were initial problems related to customisation. As there were limited options of themes, customizations all Shopify stores looked same.
Shopify introduced more themes – both Free and Paid to address this issue. The Shopify App store too was flooded by plugins from various third party developers that was able to address problems of the merchants. This was all with respect to product.
Let’s look at the marketing. Shopify through his blog started addressing problems that merchants were commonly facing with respect to sales, technical issues such as SEO, payments etc. It also introduced Shopify Academy that was conducted by industry experts and had courses from marketing to shipping practices. In addition to that Shopify’s Learn with Shopify YouTube channel featured people who were creating videos centering around entrpreneurship i.e. Shopify’s target audience.
Great Product does not mean it has be full of features. Most of the times having too many features especially in the initial stages will result in not finding any target audience.
Tech and Coffee. One fuels me while the other fuels my pocket. On days I am not writing I travel to offbeat destinations.