Why we need 140 characters
TL;DR: As a society, we do not yet have an efficient process for teaching people to build successful businesses on the Internet. Instead, they teach themselves by suffering through building “stupid” products and learning from their mistakes. It doesn’t have to be this way, and I believe we’re on the cusp of changing it.
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” — Peter Thiel
For those who haven’t heard this quote, Peter is saying the problems we, as a society, need solved are being ignored because the intellectual talent in this country has been distracted by the shininess of the Internet.
Whether or not you actually did want a flying car, Peter’s point is clear and salient. A ton of talent is flooding into the Internet software industry. Most of that talent, attracted by huge company valuations and visions of billion dollar exits dancing in their heads, is locked up by companies building seemingly meaningless businesses. Snapchat and Yo! are easy lightning rods for the cynics.
Thiel’s statement is succinct, memorable, and cuts to the core of something that many people care about. It is so powerful that it disarms and bypasses the critical thinking portion of an otherwise thoughtful brain. When I first heard this quote, I chuckled, thought “YUP” and went about my day. But it has come up a few more times over the past few years, and I’ve formed a more complex take on it. I’m writing this post today to share my thoughts on it, but most importantly to get your opinions, so please comment liberally.
A Watershed Period’s Ensuing Melee
Let’s look at the last 10 years:
- 2004: Facebook launched
- 2005: YCombinator started
- 2006: AWS EC2 released
- 2007: iPhone unveiled
Those 4 years will be remembered as a watershed period for modern software development. It represents a turning point that changed the way we approach building products. Suddenly, it was possible to create a company, rent your hardware for cheap and distribute your product wirelessly into billions of people’s pockets.
The ensuing melee is nowhere more apparent than a quick glance at Product Hunt’s homepage. There is so much stuff being created every day, that even at 9:00 am MT on New Years Eve, there are already 13 products being showcased with hundreds of votes and comments. Almost none of the ideas are novel, and many of them definitely fall into Thiel’s “140 character” category, but I don’t see that as a bad thing. I don’t see people wasting their time on meaningless apps. I see future congressman and CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies. I see people learning how to create businesses in an Internet-enabled world the only way they know how: through trial and error.
Learning how to teach is wicked hard
As a society, there are a lot of things that we know how to teach. We’ve been teaching language, martial arts, mathematics, engineering, medicine, law and their ilk for centuries. It’s nowhere near a perfect system, and the landscape of teaching these things is constantly evolving, but whenever we are taught concepts in those fields, we benefit from the result of thousands of iterations of testing out different methods for teaching them.
We haven’t had centuries to figure out how to build and deploy modern, responsive web applications in the cloud. We’ve had 500 weeks. (Tweet)
Not 500 weeks learning how to teach people to do it. 500 weeks just figuring out how the hell to do it for ourselves. It’s no wonder we’ve got our hands full dealing with “140 character” problems.
What’s next?
So where does that leave us? Will it take us centuries to learn how to properly teach people to solve problems in an Internet age? I don’t think so. Eventually, this increasing rate of change will become something we’re used to, and things will normalize. In the meantime, however, there are still huge increases in efficiency that can be made. Agile, Lean, and everything coming out of the accelerator boom have done a pretty good job of outlining how to cope with the melee. The major remaining difficulty is that reading 5 books and a few dozen blog posts is a hell of a lot different than being an operator. A lot gets lost in translation & execution.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this problem lately. A lot. Building a business? There’s a lot to learn. There are a lot of problems you need to solve that are secondary and tertiary to the core problem your business is addressing. Luckily, there are solutions in every problem category:
- Product Management
- Project Management
- Inbound Marketing
- Team Communication
- Customer Success
- Customer Retention
- Lead Generation
- Social Media Management
- Customer Relationship Management
- Customer Communication
- etc….
It’s becoming more apparent to me, however, that there is an entire category missing from the dialogue, and because this category is missing, we’ve coped by chopping up its responsibilities and tossing them into the buckets of other, preexisting categories. Acknowledging this category is key to learning how to build products more efficiently and addressing Thiel’s concerns. At Ramen (the company I’m the CEO of), we refer to this category as Product Success.
What is Product Success?
When building a product, how do you know empirically that the things you’re building are things your customers need or will pay more for? How do you know empirically that the features you’re shipping are living up to customer expectations. Product Success concerns itself mainly with asking these two questions and tracking how their responses change over time and within different segments of your customer base.
If you’re a successful Product Manager or Product Owner, you address Product Success in one of the following ways:
- You do nothing. You build your product in a bubble, throw a helpdesk link in your footer and move on. From my anecdotal experience, this is probably ~50% of you.
- You do a lot in this area. The problem is that you’re probably using 5 different tools to do it. Each of them have their strengths, but the resulting bifurcation of user data is a weakness that greatly hinders your efficacy. This is probably ~10% of you.
- Like option 2, you do a lot, but because of the difficulty in “doing it right”, not only are you inefficient, but you draw the wrong conclusions from your customer communications and send your team down the wrong path. This is, scarily, probably ~40% of you.
It shouldn’t be so difficult to implement best practices that we all know lead to creating better products more efficiently.
Flying Cars
As our thinking has evolved around Ramen and crystalized around Product Success this year, I came to realize that Ramen is a Product Success platform. It’s the answer to a question I didn’t know how to properly ask until stewing on Thiel’s comment. I want to start having a sustained dialogue about Product Success. At Ramen, we believe this is a conversation that needs to be had so we can all get better at cutting through the noise and become more efficient at creating products that generate value. And just like satisfying a level in Maslov’s pyramid, as it becomes easier to build “140 character” products, we’ll be freed up to tackle those flying cars.
More about Ramen
Ramen is a Product Success platform that helps product teams ensure their vision and execution is aligned with their customers’ needs and expectations.
If you build products and struggle with maintaining alignment with your customers, come check out Ramen.
