The Anywhere Door Problem
Intro — This blog is the first of the twenty-five blogs that we are publishing daily, one blog each day from Jan 7th until 31st — written by twenty-five of our members, sharing topics regarding “Change” — to celebrate the official change of our new company name, from HDE to HENNGE on Feb 1st.
Hi, I’m Richie Ogura. I started this company HENNGE in 1996, and have been running the company for 22 years. I love to make many mistakes and I am still enjoying making mistakes every day, by doing something different. Since I’ve been almost always thinking about how to create a new product, today I’d like to share my thoughts on how to start a new product in a startup.
“How should I start building a new product…?”
When thinking of building a new product, to dream big is important, but to find something you can actually work on is also important, not to let the dream be just a dream.
A common pitfall, typically found among people who have sales or marketing background, is to start planning about a new product with a question like “What kind of a great product will sell like hotcakes?”. Why this is not good is, because you will probably come up with a great product which takes decades until production, if not impossible. I call this the “Anywhere Door Problem”.
The Anywhere Door Problem
The “Anywhere Door,” or the “Dokodemo Door,” is a fictional gadget which is used frequently in the anime Doraemon. It looks like an ordinary door frame, but it’s actually a future gadget which has a superpower to take you anywhere you want to go. You say where you want to go, open the door, and then there is a warp hole connected to the place you said.
http://doraemon.wikia.com/wiki/Anywhere_Door
If you could produce The Anywhere Door, there would definitely be a huge market. But the big problem is that it’s yet almost impossible to build at least at this moment.
You might think that this example is too apparent, but you might easily come up with something like an Anywhere Door even when you are talking about something more familiar, like a smartphone app or any kind of a technology you are not an expert at if you start thinking what you can sell.
Immoderately Technology-Oriented Phenomenon
On the opposite side, there is the Immoderately Technology-Oriented Phenomenon.
Developers and engineers are a type of people who want to keep learning and improving, by nature. When they are doing a work which can both make use of their expertise and also let them learn something new which could bring in large possibility to their toolbox, they will be highly motivated and super productive. This “healthy learning addiction” could make the ship scud superfast under a good condition.
However, if you are a person with a technical background, and you are starting to plan a product with a question like “What can we produce with our current expertise?” or “How can I have a chance to use this new technology?”, You will also likely fall into a problem building a product which is not helping anyone, which might reach the production but will not sell well, making the business unsustainable. Since the technical people are always polishing their skills and learning new things by experimenting with new ideas, it’s sometimes difficult to switch the way of thinking.
So, how can we go successfully? We want to help the customers and have excellent and sustainable sales. We want to make use of the “healthy learning addiction” by keeping the engineers happy and motivated. The answer is to focus on real problems, before talking about the actual solution or sales, or technology.
Finding a Real Problem
If you can solve a real problem, there will be a customer. There will be someone who would pay for your solution, and the “good and sustainable sales” problem is solved. Once you’ve found a real problem, you are almost winning. However, a real problem is not a problem you think it exists: It’s a problem that a considerable amount of people agrees that it exists and is bothering them. Finding a real problem is not an easy job. You probably need to do some field research, or interviews, before ditching dozens of ideas, to be confident whether a problem really exists or not.
Once you got a real problem, think about how to solve the problem. Ask technical people to build a proof-of-concept product quickly, or draw something on a paper if that’s not possible, which could solve the problem. Show it to the customer, and voila, you got a new product seed!
In this way, rather than talking about “How to build the Anywhere Door,” we can think about the real problem. Maybe we can find that we didn’t necessarily need the Anywhere Door, because the real problem was something like “I can’t get precise weather information of a specific place,” or maybe something like “I can’t visit my family often.” Those kinds of problems might be able to be solved by building something like Weather.com, or something like Skype. It still looks not easy to build, but it’s more accessible compared to inventing the Anywhere Door.
HENNGE’s Case
Once a company invents a real solution which solves a real problem, the company tends to focus on improving the solution to make more people happier, rather than finding another real problem and scaffolding up possible solutions.
One problem happening in our company is that we are exactly at that stage. We started our current flagship service when we had a difficulty accessing the cloud when the earthquake hit Japan in 2011. Ever since then, we have been focusing on improving our current service to give a better experience to our customers and to make it more scalable to serve it to more and more customers. That’s probably the right strategy to be profitable, but because of that, we haven’t been encouraging finding more real problems.
Since our corporate mission is “Liberation of Technology,” which means “to deliver the power of the technology to as many people as we can,” we would like to solve various problems by technology. To widen the variety of problems we are attacking, we started our internal activities to find more real problems and to cultivate prototypers by stimulating potential prototypers.
This is another reason why our company is changing our name to HENNGE, which means “to change” in Japanese.
Hopefully, we’d like to find more real problems, to deliver the power of technology to the customers in this new year.
For more information about the change in our company name: https://www.hde.co.jp/en/about-us/trade-name-changed.html
