Back in 2003, Peter Morley-Souter captioned his comics “Rule #34 There is porn of it. No exceptions.” to convey his shock when running into a Calvin and Hobbes parody porn (Wiki). Today, this is not just an internet meme, but common knowledge; even if your fantasy is riding naked on a camel’s back in the desert with a string quartet watching, you can rest assured, someone’s made a porn* of it. And isn't that a relief, a comic relief even, to learn we’re not that special?

So it’s safe to assume, that if our little sex fantasies are shared by others, so are our product fantasies and longings. When building a new product or service, too often we’re told that developing features based on our own personal preferences is wrong, that it’s not “user-centric”. But is that really the case? Is each and every one of us really that special that we’re the only user in the world who needs a specific feature? As much as I like to think of myself as special — I don’t think so.

What should a super-user wear on her first date?

Let me share an anecdote about the first time I learned I wasn't that special. It was back in 2007, when I founded my first startup, the since deceased marketplace for indie fashion called Sense of Fashion (.com) I was talking to my first investor — a successful serial entrepreneur himself — discussing a list of features I had in mind, when I got to a feature called Fashion Emergency. It was a feature that allowed users to upload a poll with one question and up to 3 photos as multiple choice answers, for the entire community to vote on ASAP. Something like: “I have a first date tonight, which of these three outfits should I wear?” My investor’s comment was, that the feature is way too specific. “What concerns me,” he said, “is that you’re the super-user. This feature is something you want for yourself. But not everyone is a super-user and most people won’t use this feature.”

I didn't listen to him. Not because I was so smart, on the contrary, because I was a first time founder and didn't know better than to launch with over a dozen features. When my co-founder texted me to say he deployed with the new feature, I was with my other co-founder, Yael (today founder of Stevie), at a shop buying a new laptop. I was debating on whether I should buy the black or the white one. “What are we thinking? We’ll post our first Fashion Emergency,” we said to ourselves. We didn't have smartphones. I took photos of the two laptops — the black and the white — downloaded them from the camera to the computer and posted our very first Fashion Emergency. In 5 minutes time we got over 40 votes (with a majority for the white laptop). Within another month it was clear that this feature, my personal favorite, caught on the most and was used by the fashion community that populated our site in more ways than I could predict, like fashion designers asking the community to cast its vote on colors and patterns for future collections.

Somebody’s watching me

I took this lesson with me to my second startup, to my blogging and to the startup I currently work at as part of the founding team — daPulse. Here are examples of two small features we developed based on our own needs, that were embraced by our users:

1. Roy, daPulse’s founder and CEO, used to do all the design, back when we were a team of five (i’ll just say daPulse is a company collaboration tool, otherwise my examples will make no sense). He was losing his mind over the 20 seconds it took to save a file and upload it to daPulse as a photo, to share new designs. So he asked R&D to develop a feature enabling easy copy+paste from a design file onto daPulse. They slaved over this feature, which could have been perceived as one his whims, but sure enough, very shortly after the feature was launched it was clear users were grateful for it. All our customer’s UI / UX / design people use it constantly in their design iterations and for getting feedback on designs.

2. A while before facebook came out with this feature, our team found a way to add a Who Viewed This to each update on daPulse. Again, we wanted this for ourselves, because we thought even with our small team it would be way more efficient than constantly asking each other “did you see my update on X?”

And so we released it. At first, our customers later told us, people were using it mostly to tease one another, saying things like “I know you didn't bother seeing my last update”. But pretty soon, people realized this was a huge time saver; they could instantly know who was in the loop and with those people, they could hit the ground running — no bringing up to speed needed. Some of our customers told us they considered this to be a killer feature, because it makes internal emails sent just to say “got it” or “great” completely redundant.

So it turned out that what we built for our small team, just because we wanted it for ourselves, were features useful to our users. Once again I discovered I wasn’t that special. So now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to ride a camel, naked. See you there.

* Say NO to exploitation — watch only animation porn.