Products are used by people at the end of the day. Before we look for ideas, I suggest we investigate how people work.
As humans, we maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This is the bottom line of the “Pleasure Principle”, the instinctual hunt for pleasure and avoidance of pain to satisfy biological and psychological needs.
Even if maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain is at a greater cost to us:
We indulge on deserts and fried foods despite the clear consequences. We overspend our budget on sushi lunches, brunch Sundays, Michael Kors hand bags, and that $2,299 digital SLR that we put on auto mode. Those who are lonely will spend money and time to be around others. Those who got food poisoned from curry would likely never eat curry again. We avoid our ex’s and delete photos because they remind us of prior emotional pain. Even our brains will subconsciously block out emotional painful events from our conscious awareness — this is called Repressed Memories.
It’s how we are psychologically constructed.
There are two types of ideas:
- Pleasure-inducing
- Problem-solving
Facebook is a prime example of a pleasure-inducing idea. Facebook allows us to construct an ideal world and be rewarded by attention and raising our self-esteem. Games, entertainment and vice products also give us an abundance of pleasure but do not exist solely to solve immediate roadblocks and problems.
Ideas such as Uber and Dropbox solve immediate pains such as the difficulty of hailing a taxi in major cities and the difficulty of sharing files across devices and people; while Palantir Technologies solves the world’s biggest fraudulent problems.
Good ideas that people love are typically in one of the two extremes of what I call the “Painsure continuum.” An idea can’t just be in between: ideas that are “sorta” fun or “sorta” solves a problem don’t gain adoption.
Think of a personal problem you have (i.e. finding a partner, finding a job, relationship issues, etc…) If I can guarantee to solve it for $1,000, would you pay it? Quite likely.
So what does having a “sorta” useful, fun app (aka “death”) feel like? Some users will use the app but they won’t convert to paying customers — poor retention. Users feedback emails are filled with questions instead of “I love your product!” Weeks after a marketing campaign, a “sorta” app’s numbers will look as if the campaign never even launched. Growth is simply not there. Traction is not there. And traction can be defined as 1. users are willing to pay 2. growing active users.
Of course, one could argue the app, Tinder is not only pleasure-inducing, but pain-reducing the dating problem. Perhaps great ideas hit both ends of the Painsure spectrum at the same time: not only do they solve a great problem, they also create great pleasure for their users.
There are possibly other categories of ideas that don’t fall onto the Painsure Continuum such as ad exchanges and trading platforms. These tie directly to money, which as we know, is always in demand. If you have ways to compete on price (i.e. Robinhood) and optimization, you have a shot.
In conclusion, the Painsure Continuum provides a simplistic framework to think about product ideas. But sometimes the market is random. The key is to experiment which of your ten ideas is at one end of the Painsure spectrum.
James Hu is the founder and CEO of Jobscan, a web tool that helps job seekers land interviews by optimizing resume keywords. With eight years of technology product experience, he previously co-founded an award-winning transportation start-up and worked as product managers for Kabam Games, Groupon, and Microsoft. James grew up in Seattle and graduated from the University of Washington and is determined to build more useful tools for job seekers. James is fluent in English, Chinese, and restaurant-Spanish.
You can follow James on Twitter and Jobscan on Twitter and LinkedIn
