Sometimes, People Do Not Know What They Want — Introducing Mypothesis
When Facebook launched its “News Feed” feature, there was a huge outrage. Online communities were formed to protest against it, particularly because a lot of people agreed that it promoted stalking.
A young CEO, Mark Zuckerberg was already battling trust issues within his company. For one, he wasn’t quite vocal about Facebook’s direction yet was always found jumping from one suspicious meeting to the other that could shape the future of the company. Some employees had enough reason to believe that he was way in over his head.
Amid protests against the News Feed and the aforementioned internal tension, Mark had to be decisive. On one hand, he believed so much in the News Feed, and, on the other, users swore that it was an atrocity. What to do?
He stuck to his guns.
With only a few tweaks, the News Feed stayed put due to his conviction that it was going to be a gamechanger.
And a gamechanger it was.
Not only did the News Feed grow on people and make Facebook more interesting, but it has also since become an integral part of most social networks. It is, in fact, almost an unwritten rule that every social network should have some semblance of a news feed as a feature.
….
I started this piece with the Facebook story (which I learned from reading this book in mid-2018) to justify my belief that sometimes, the customer may be wrong and people do not always know what they want.
As most introductory texts on Economics would establish, humans aren’t always rational about their needs. But what isn’t clearly established is that people do not always know exactly what they want until you show them.
Think about Airbnb. Although the idea behind the product is fairly simple, if, before it was created, you had quizzed a number of people on how to solve the problem which Airbnb currently solves, not many would have a clear idea or proffer a solution that’s similar to the awesomeness which Airbnb is.
An idea for a product is always the product of a hypothesis: you assume that people want X — and your perception can be influenced by more than one factor. One way to validate this idea — hence, attempting to show people what you think they want — is by conducting user research.
But research isn’t always a silver bullet. Sometimes people don’t exactly picture an idea just as it’s domiciled in your head, and this is why building a compact version of the product is important — usually termed a prototype or Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
…
…
Being a quiet observer of various conversations on the internet and also being well aware of some of the problems that I want solved, I always come up with a lot of assumptions. Due to this, I’m starting what I term Mypothesis — a series of compact products that will emanate from my assumptions (hence, my hypothesis).
Mypothesis is not a company but rather a catalog of experiments that will help give life to why I learned software development — to create a whole lot of things that I believe people want/need. The products will come from sheer weekend hacking and I’m particular about embarking on only “low-stress” projects because, at the moment, I have no interest whatsoever in building a company or something that will require hired hands or need a lot of support as common of the output of business ventures.
I also understand that building is the easy part but getting a product to the target user requires coming up with effective distribution channels. I don’t have a lot of clout (?) to market anything on my own, and this is why I’ll devise a number of strategies — part of which is this blog post :-).
Every blog post I write under the umbrella of Mypothesis will touch on:
- The hypothesis behind a product or a feature.
- The outcome of the experiment
- What I have learned and some possible takeaways for businesses looking at building something similar.
It’s going to be an adventure (especially if people actually get to use the stuff that’s put out), and if you ever come across this post, then you should consider staying tuned to this space.
I’ll launch and write about the first product in the second week of May 2020.
