Not thinking like the majority of people can lead to building products no one wants
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect”. -Mark Twain [0]
The day before yesterday a non-technical friend of mine showed me the iOS app he built with no programming whatsoever using one of the visual mobile app builders, Appery.io. It’s a simple app which lets you browse through the list of restaurants, bars, theaters, etc. in Astana, Kazakhstan. Essentially, it’s the localized mini subset of Yelp. You can quickly brush off this idea as nothing special, but they already have 16,000 downloads on iOS alone in just a few months. Remarkable given (or rather thanks to) the niche nature of the idea.
So this got me thinking. To build something popular while still scratching your own itch, you have to experience life like the majority of people. If you are not thinking like most people, the odds are that you’ll build something no one needs or wants. I would have never built local Yelp clone, it’s just not who I’m, and the products should be extensions of who we are, shouldn’t they [1]? This reminded me of my high school days when four of my sites were consistently making 300,000 hits a month. I was my own audience, thought like them and had easy time building things for the Russian speaking part of the Internet, quite nascent back in 2002–2003.
Things have changed today. I unfortunately don’t speak the same language (metaphorically and literally) with the majority of my audience, I feel. So the products I want to see exist in the world have little appeal to them. One can argue that I should consider building apps where I’m not the target audience. But today my natural curiosity wouldn’t be satisfied if I was building a boring painkiller for someone else.
Notes
[0] I’m taking the inverse of that and pausing to reflect having found myself on the opposite side of the majority.
[1] Creative process over business needs.
