Product Exercise Day 1 of 20: How not to Launch
This is Day 1 of my 20-day Product Challenge
What is the product about?
How not to Launch is a curated publication of stories comprising of guides of what not to do when launching a startup or product or app. The app consists of different startups grouped by their category/market type. Each startup has at least a publication of a past failure which is aimed at providing advice to future makers and entrepreneurs on what to avoid when starting out.
Makers can add a story about a failure they have experienced when launching a new product, the story will be reviewed and posted on the app. Also, curators can share stories of other startup failures gotten from different sources around the web.
Potential Customers: Entrepreneurs, product makers, indie developers, product managers, etc. Basically, anyone looking to launch a new product/feature.
How did the creator(s) think about this idea?
In today’s world, we often only hear about the successful products. This shields potential product makers from learning anything about building products. The real lessons are learnt from failure, and this is the thinking behind the creation of How not to launch. The creator of this product is Wendy Dean. Wendy believes there is so much to learn from failure. A very huge percentage of new products fail, and there is so much to learn from reading or listening to what caused them to fail.
“Failure is important, but it is just as important to learn from it”. The goal is to create a curated list of well-written inspiring publications on failure created for makers by makers.
What did they get right?
Many of this stories are available online in different scattered locations. The goal is to bring all this different articles under one roof, to make it easy for anyone looking for advice. It is also easy for makers and curators to share their story. It is a very simple app, which will cost little time and resources to build.
Competition
Some potential competitors include:
Why do people like the product?
Reading from the comments on producthunt, most people liked the design of the product. The user interface design stands out, and personally I was amazed by the website design. The site navigation is very simple, it is easy to surf the site without any help.
Possible Improvements
There is much colour contrast, there are too much colours flying all over the website, especially on the startup cards. I notice that the card colours are used to differentiate between the different categories. However, something more subtle would be useful, I suggest sticking to a particular theme for the startup card, and using a more subtle category differentiator like border colour or card header colour. The category label alone seems fine to me.
Also, clearly differentiate between the Company name, Title, and the description using gestalt principle of similarity.
The “Add a story” button should stand out as a call to action with a different colour. Currently it is the same colour as the category buttons, which could be interpreted as performing the same action.
Thanks for reading, I’ll still be posting another Product Exercise tomorrow as part of my daily product challenge for 20 days.
