How to Build Killer Products — Our new blog series pt. 1
Tldr: App devs and PM’s everywhere have been asking for feedback on their apps after I published this article. This post is the first in a new series on how to build killer apps. This series will feature founders from SV, product builders, and stories of failure and success. Brian and I will be tweeting out the articles from @blaurenceclark and @datarade so be sure to follow us. ☺
By: Kumar Thangudu
We’ve now put together a set of blog posts based on our knowledge of 13,000+ mobile and web apps, hours of interviews with founders and Product managers, winning over 100K+ in hackathons, and stories of creators that will inspire you.
This blog series is optimistic about those who create and those who do.
Who are we?
- Brian Clark. Developer. Founder of Vue Analytics. Advisor at LinkTexting.
- Kumar Thangudu. Industrial Engnr & Textile Engnr. YC Alum.
- Reza Jelveh. Developer, Computer Engineer, & Lifelong Developer.
- Lavanya Shukla. Founder, Marteenee.com.
- Helena Powell. Co-founder & CEO @VentureOut Previously Engineering at Israeli Air Force
- Sami Bashir — Lifelong videogame maker.
- Ashu Desai — makeschool.com founder. YC alum.
- Zach Kupperman — Founder at Dinnerlab.
- Martin Wallner — Online Pharmaceutical business. Vamida.
- Wajahat Siddiqui— Hackathoner & Dev at Wearable Intelligence.
- Danny Haber — The Negev- Housing Entrepreneur
- Stephanie Dionne — VisionBoards — Mission Entrepreneur
- Kirill Zubovsky — Scoutzie- Founder
- Thomas Schranz — Blossom.io —Founder
Why are we doing this?
We love technology.
Brian and I engage with technology in a fashion that some would consider to be patently absurd: when we delve into programmatic and physical engineering respectively, we become obsessive. We f*cking love technology and we want to share our knowledge. Getting to where we are today took a lot of blood sweat and tears. I can speak personally that for a long time, I built some really shitty products.
The things I built launched either physically or digitally completely sucked. It took a lot of trial and error, and I’ve finally been able to find a way to fail less. I hope that by sharing some of the lessons I’ve learned and what other founders have learned that will help others.
The road to becoming a great creator is paved with sweat, lots of mediocre productions, and learnings.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not..……It’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take awhile. You just gotta fight your way through.” — Ira Glass
The Relentlessly Prolific
There are 2 examples that always come to mind when I think of people who really create amazing products.
1) Myshkin Ingawale and his team endured a mind-boggling 32 failed prototypes before solving the anemia diagnosis problem. Today they have revolutionized health care and can now diagnose anemia with a 20 second blood test.
2) Yitang Zhang, an obsucre mathematician, worked at a Subway to make ends meet before solving an age-old proof about the finite distance constraint between primes. (70M*).
His finding was the first time anyone had managed to put a finite bound on the gaps between prime numbers, representing a major leap toward proving the centuries-old twin primes conjecture, which posits that there are infinitely many pairs of primes separated by only two (such as 11 and 13). Source.
We hope that by sharing these stories and lessons that we can help app developers to get more in touch with their users and build products. These stories are just two examples of individuals who never gave up on their goals.
The Nature of the Content.
We’ll be reviewing things like Pricing, App creation, feedback loops, useful technologies, common mistakes, scaling issues, and interviews, and great founder stories.
We hope that by sharing this info that we will help other creators build stuff that people want.
Table of Contents:
- We Downloaded 10,000 Mobile Apps. Lessons Learned. (Medium Score: 120 Recommends, 1800+ Shares)
- Why Google Struggles to Build Killer Products
- The story of Shrimp Peeling and Conveyor Belts.
- The Formulaic Value of Early Customer Conversations in $$.
- Net Promoter Score. A Precise Barometer.
- How to Talk to Customers. The Nuances.
- We used 3214 Web Apps. Lessons Learned.
- Why Growth Hacking is ‘Bullshit’
- Why the Inability to Build Puts you at a Heuristic Disadvantage.
- Indomitable Founders.
- Amazing Creators You might not Have Heard of.
- Obtaining Viable Feedback.
- Avoidable UX Nightmares
- The Effect of Recency on User Happiness.
- What Comedian Patrice O’Neal taught us about Recency, Frequency, and Conversion.
- The 25 If-then scenarios Every Founder Should Know by Heart.
