Why products fail even before they bloom?

Product with great ideas too failed. But, a lot can be learnt from the failures.

This decade has seen a lot of products go from $0 to $10K in a day. Also it has seen products go “zooooom” invisible into the wormhole. Studying the product’s success as well as the failures, I understood there are 3 important pointers to be considered.

Study the target market

Lot of your development time should be balanced with a lot of your research time. Never skip your home work. Not everyone’s problem is solved using your solution. People needs variety and that’s why a lot of innovations happening every day.

So, finding your product’s right target market is very important. Running campaigns and workshops can help you find your audience to target.

For example, BaseCamp’s target audiences are the companies which needs all of its work organized in once place and where the employees could communicate seamlessly. This application might get tricky for the big corporates, but for most of the companies upto 10K members can be easily managed through basecamp.

You need to go more specifics about your target market. That’s the right way to increase your conversion rate.

@hakbar2707 wrote a wonderful article on PMF(product market fit) https://medium.com/@hakbar2707/6-ways-to-measure-product-market-fit-for-saas-startups-699a55fdd6d3

Landing on the perfect value metrics

Value metrics defines you individually among your competitors. Be it the pricing as your defining-value-metrics or the features you are ready to provide in the basic plan or so.

To provide an easier understanding, consider the following example.

Consider a messaging platform like Slack. Let’s review their free plans.

1. One platform, say X, provides you restriction on number of messages you could send per month but you are open to access all the integrations.
2. Another platform, say Z, provides no restriction of messages but provides you no integrations.

Amongst the two, I’d go with the first one because my team rarely communicates but we need webhooks because more often we don’t check in. But with webhooks, I can target my team’s telegram group if emergency.

Because of that particular metric, my team gains a lot and I go with the platform X.

With proper market study, you will know your audience and so you can derive the right value metrics.

Manage and work on your feedbacks

No product is ever a perfect product.

Your user’s behaviors evolve. Your user’s use cases evolve. Pivoting is not the suggestion. But upgrades and updates always favors a product’s growth.

But choosing what to upgrade and what to introduce in the releases matters the most because they always costs the company with time and resources. Not every company can understand their user’s expectation and build the right upgrades. Here’s what the potential of feedbacks comes into play.

A lot of companies proved to be successful because of it’s user voices. The product is for their users and these users are the loyal consumers of the product. Most of the time, the user’s very much needed-features aren’t the priority for the developers because of the awareness of the new feature’s potential.

Choosing a platform to organize, manage and prioritize features could help the company understand it’s users. And avoid spending pennies and days on the wrong development.

https://medium.com/hellonext/users-real-problem-in-your-product-75a670bc9610 Here I wrote about how feedbacks could serve your product better.

A word of wisdom

There are lot of zen for startups out there. But these three are the places where most of the starters go wrong and unfortunately ends up wasting their time and money. Plan things accordingly, spend enough resources and work smart.

Good luck to all the new starters. Hope this helps you in a better way.