What if I'm Building the Wrong Product?

TL;DR: "What if I'm spending all this time and money building the wrong product? How do I even know for sure where to start or what questions to ask? Am I supposed to be guessing?"

We're all building the wrong product — we just don't know it yet.

Every great product is really just a bunch of bad assumptions that get shaped into the right ones. The idea that we could define exactly what our customer wants with all the perfect features is mostly a myth (unless we got lucky!)

What's tricky as Founders is that we have a very short window to get this right, and let's face it, our livelihoods often depend on that window. We don't have countless months and years to "tinker" — we have to get this thing right really fast.

So we end up beating our heads against the wall, trying to compress time and get the perfect product to the market so we can build and scale a successful company. But what if the time we're trying to compress is the very time we need to get it right, to begin with?

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Customers Shape Products

What we need to understand is that we're really not the ones who shape our products — our customers do. Or, at least, they usually should. The reality is that if we can't refine the product into something that customers love, then yes, we're absolutely building the wrong product.

And it happens. There is no lack of startup tombstones whose epitaphs are emblazoned with a once-great product idea that no one wanted (see Google Glass, New Coke, Segway, Betamax, Juicero...) Even the best companies with the most expansive budgets get it wrong.

But we get it right when we let our customers shape the product by constantly obsessing over their feedback and asking, "Yeah, but what if we could do this?" over and over and over. All of those details, all of those questions, help shape what the product should absolutely be. 

Start with Raw Clay

It's best to think of our initial product as just raw clay ready to be molded. When we frame the product in that manner, it helps us get away from the notion that we should have a final product out of the gates. Yes, it's frustrating — who wouldn't want to have the perfect product from the start?

In order to get the feedback we need to refine the product, we have to get something out there for people to see. It won't be perfect — the initial products never are. Remember, we're using Google Search version 1,000 from what it was 25 years ago.  

Our initial "raw clay" is just the most basic concept of our product (in the startup world, it is called the "Minimum Viable Product" or MVP). We should launch our MVP early as a mechanism to find out what the product should be with user feedback and testing. The more we try to guess ahead of time, the more likely we will be spending valuable time and money running down the wrong path.

"Yeah, but What if it Still Sucks?"

There's a big chance that even after all of that effort, we still wind up a product that no one wants. Just because an idea is new or novel doesn't mean anyone wants it. Yet we also need to consider the fact that sometimes good products have bad launches. 

Sometimes we can't attract the audience we need to or have enough resources to build the product properly, or in some cases, we might have the right product at the wrong time. What matters is our ability to navigate from that point.  

We've been living this philosophy ourselves at Startups.com for over a decade. All of our products get morphed over time into what we think they should be based on what our users (you!) tell us. We don't even pretend to have the answers anymore — we've just slowly gotten better at asking the right questions! That's all we can count on.

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In Case You Missed It

Forget "Big Ideas" — Start With Your North Star (podcast) We need to focus on what we are trying to achieve before taking action on any big ideas because some of these ideas don't necessarily lead to where we want to go.

Everyone Says My Idea is Dumb. Is It? Becoming a Founder is often the first time in our lives where the advice of others — even our parents — may not necessarily be useful advice. So let’s be hyper-aware about how we get feedback and who we're asking to evaluate our idea.

What is Product Differentiation? As Founders, how do we clarify the differences between our products and other products on the market while preventing overlap between the offerings? 

Love this topic? Hate it? Let's chat on social media!

Wil Schroter

Founder & CEO @ Startups.com