Did you know the real story behind these Products?
Let’s be honest! We all have been in that situation where we walk in the kitchen in the middle of the night, wearing an imaginary chef’s hat, masterchef’s title track playing in the background, a delectable intercontinental cuisine in our mind, and we walk out with a yumm maggi! Believe me, we all have been there. Now that I have won your trust, let me paint a little picture for you so that we imagine the same things together. In the debate, what came first — chicken or eggs, apparently, we have won, because we needed proteins.
In simple terms, first, sometimes what we start with is not really what the user wants. And second, the needs of the users are supreme! Thus, it brings me to sharing these founding stories of our everyday apps, whose first versions were definitely not what we use today!
YouTube’s Romantic Origins
The video sharing giant actually first came out of the shell as a dating app. The idea was that a person will share a video of himself for the prospects and then accordingly people can meet and take things forward if they want to. Co-founder Jawed Karim shared that they had a slogan for the platform at that time “Tune in, Hook up!” However, it looked like people swiped left for this version. The founders took the sign and remodeled the platform from only dating videos to any video sharing. YouTube’s first official video is Karim’s “Me At The Zoo”, eighteen seconds of elephants. Well, we know the rest is history!
Airbnb: Story of Broke to Record Breakers
In 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were broke and wanted to make rent. It’s obvious that they didn’t know about Laxmi Chit Fund, so the boys decided to rent out a spare air mattress in their house for the night to the participants of a conference that was happening in the city. They also offered breakfast. Thus, the first name airbedandbreakfast.com! The idea does sound wild at the minute — lending a space to a complete stranger in your house — but who knew that it will become a go-to for every person who wants a home away from home! Very cliche and movie-like, I know, but these guys did it!
Netflix and Chill
Looks like someone has got a glow up like no one has seen before! From a DVD-by-mail service, Netflix has grown up to be the most popular high school girl, everyone is talking about it, everyone wants to hangout with it. It has a slang in its name! If we go back in time and see the growth it’s nothing less than a typical movie! DVD-by-mail service, subscription to rent movies, fight against Blockbuster, video on demand, to the OTT giant! If it wasn’t for this former DVD-by-mail service provider, there wouldn’t have been the culture of binge watching either. The glow-up on every stage and changing the dynamics of the industry, that’s definitely very main-hero-like!
Send a Snap!
Living in the moment, sharing the fun in real time — this sounds like Snapchat as we know it now. However, the first proposition of this yellow iconed moment sharing app was of self-deleting photos during conversations. The stanford founder made the case for snapchat in the first-blog quite like this “And after hearing hilarious stories about emergency detagging of Facebook photos before job interviews and photoshopping blemishes out of candid shots before they hit the Internet (because your world would crumble if anyone found out you had a pimple on the 38th day of 9th grade), there had to be a better solution.” Trust me, the proposition has changed now and so has snapchat as we know it now!
Pin-interests and make boards!
The way we use pinterest for several inspirations today is actually the same way it was born. The founders got the inspiration from another app which was built on the concept of replacing physical magazines with digital ones. Circle of life! The founders realised from the data they had that people look for products and not brands. This led them to develop the idea of “buckets” and the user can make the bucket lists! Now, we like it more as mood boards but that’s fine as we can make our own aesthetics by pinning the interest!
PM Buddies! The one thing that is common in all these cases is that the first MVP and the current versions are way different. But these products are successful because they realized what the user actually wants over the time and built and rebuilt the better roll outs! The quality of accepting that ‘this might not work, let’s reiterate’ is very important in this changing-by-the-second industry. Feeling overwhelmed? Well don’t. Check out the courses at accredian.com and you’re sorted!
Take out your PM hats and roll out amazing products!
