Your Product, And Maybe Your Business Will Fail

Yes. It will. Not because you do not love it. Not because you did not hire the best minds you could afford. Not because you did not run the best marketing campaign. Not because you ran out of money. It fails because of the simplest and most easily overlooked of problems: it was never useful to your customers.

Let us go back to when it all started; the beginning. This is the general path most teams that have launched “successful” products have taken.

You had an idea. Or someone did.

It was such a massive solution that you were shocked no one was doing it, and then you became scared that someone would steal it from you/your team now that you found this idea.

So you recruit followers/employees/financiers to your cause. You are motivated by quotes and experiences you have heard or read somewhere. Jump of the cliff and build the plane on the way down. Fail fast. Where there is a will there is a way.

You have finally built the product. Finally! Code is completed, or not. You can go from problem to solution. Perfecto. Now you launch. You get the press involved. You get a marketing team on board. You need to get the “hype” out there. Ah ah, this is the federal Republic of XYZ, where media hype makes people do stuff. See what happened to Snapchat, to Apple, to all the successful other companies. Users sign up in droves (if it was a huge campaign), or trickle in (if it was a budget campaign).

The total cost of getting that product from idea to the market is now starting to feel like a noose around the neck (or in my country’s own parlance- like somebody dey press you). People are getting disgruntled. Expectations are not matching the reality of the real world. Fingers start to fly, some people move to the next project, jobs are lost. And then, one of 3 realities sets in.

One. Kill this or pivot to something else. It feels like a knife just cut through your soul.

Two. Pump more money at this. Ramp up marketing. Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, it does not. But one thing is guaranteed- it is always near impossible to financially recover from this.

Three. You actually solved a problem and customers are trouping to you in droves! You were spared the harsh realities of failure. This however, is the needle. Reality is the haystack.

All these beg the question; is there a less costly, less finance intensive, and less time wasting way to build products that fall in category 3? Who is currently building products that have a higher probability to fall in category 3? How are they doing it? Can it be replicated?

That is what this all about. A series of guides, trainings, experiments, and in some cases, interventions, all documented via this publication. Real methods, tried and tested paths to build winning products.

Our team is made up of Entrepreneurs, Product Managers, UX Designers, and UX Researchers; all who have gone through their own journeys in their areas of specialization and now want to help the ecosystem in “developing markets” to build cost effective, solutions to major problems (naturally we expect that this would make these products/businesses more profitable). We share what made us fail, what worked for us, and global best case practices with a local application.

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