Constraint Equations: Time and Money

With every person in the world, there are two hard constraints to deal with. Time, or money (or both).

If you’re business serving a B2C audience, you want to worry about the hard constraints, and the hard constraints alone. (Everything else is ops — solvable through smarts, process, technology and people).

Think about two introspective questions:
Q1) Does your product/service save a user’s time?
Q2) Does your product/service save a user’s money?

Then think about another two:
Q1) Does your user have a time constraint?
Q2) Does your user have a money constraint?

If there’s a “Yes” and “Yes” on either the Q1s or Q2s, you’ve got a good starting point. The idea here is to be brutally honest on the introspective questions, and not fall for the founder delusion (E.g. If you think your product is like the iPhone or Facebook).

Case Studies in the matter for reading: IKEA, Homejoy, Expedia

P.S.: Secret? Save a bit of time and lot of money, or a lot of time and a bit of money. Best recipe. (Practically all eCommerce is built on this rule.)
P.P.S: Luxury goods and entertainment are a notable exception, of course.