One of my mentors once told me that in order for a user to switch from an existing solution to yours, your product has to be 10x better than the incumbent. The Model T is a good example of this idea.
The Model T was the first car mass-produced on moving assembly lines with completely interchangeable parts. When Henry Ford introduced it in 1908, it didn’t take long for people abandon their horse-drawn carriages. Car ownership jumped 2565% from 2.24 per 1000 people to 59.69 per 1000 people.
Recent examples of 10x companies include Uber, Facebook, Netflix, Dropbox, etc. These are the companies that were just way better than their incumbants. As a result, they got the incumbants’ users to switch. Yet, there is a surprising amount of products that aren’t 10x better than their incumbents, but still made a significant amount of users to switch.
Think Medium, Pocket or Product Hunt. What’s their secret?
Invest in making a great user experience
I first saw this phenomenon in 2011 with Sparrow. Sparrow was an email client for Mac and iOS. Functionality-wise, it wasn’t very different from Gmail. It only had a few features that were different from Gmail. In fact, Sparrow lacked a lot of features that made Gmail stand out, like gchat or labs.
But against all logic, Sparrow went on to become massively popular. In February 2011, Sparrow was the top paid and top grossing app in the App Store the same day it launched. By March 2012, Sparrow had 100,000 Daily Active Users. At its height, in September 2012, Sparrow had an estimated 0.19% of the total email market share.
That kind of growth would not go unnoticed. Google acquired Sparrow in July 2012, to the chagrin of many passionate Sparrow users. The buyout meant that there would be no longer any updates to the apps, leaving many users with the difficult choice of going back to their old client or finding an alternative.
For the longest time, I didn’t understand what about Sparrow was so appealing that caused people to flock (no pun intended) to it. How did a simple mail client with so few differentiators do so well?
It took me years, but I think I finally understand the concept enough to write about it:
Not all products have to be 10x better than the incumbent to make users switch. In some cases, the switching can be achieved by marginally improving the user experience.
Delight the user
If you have ever gotten a thoughtful gift from someone, you probably remember feeling cared for and cherished. To have evoked that positive emotion in you, that person must have put either a lot or time or effort into the gift. In the same way that this person delighted you, product teams can delight users with that caring mindset. By thinking about what would make the user happy, many products can emulate the success that Sparrow achieved.
Sparrow approached email the same way Slack approaches corporate communications: by adding a delighting human element to a drab client.
No matter how you look at it, the typical inbox experience is not exciting. Every time you look at your inbox you are looking at a list of tasks, follow-ups, reminders, etc. that all require processing. Sparrow made looking at your inbox more enjoyable by putting your contact’s Facebook profile picture next to their email. Even though they didn’t reduce the burden of email overload, Sparrow brightened up the your day by greeting you with familiar faces.
Its Dropbox integration allowed you to upload attachments bigger than 25MB. That meant that you didn’t have to fumble with a PDF compression software or upload your vacation photos to Picassa.
Universal search allowed you to search in all your inboxes quickly, which proved to be a great hit among people with several email accounts.
Sprinkled all over Sparrow were these little delightful experiences. Although these little things were big differentiators themselves, the sum made the email experience much more enjoyable. The Sparrow team thought ahead and tried to imagine what a great email experience would look like.
Bring joy to the mundane
When it first came out, Slack wasn’t 10x better than some of the messaging apps like Microsoft’s Lync. In fact, Slack initially lacked a lot of features that Lync had like group chats, calls, digital whiteboards, etc.
However, Slack shined by turning the corporate communication experience from an okay one to a fantastic one. It displayed friendly welcome messages, allowed users to send large files, and had a ton of great API integrations with apps like Intercom, Twitter and Giphy.
My favorite one to date is the LaunchKit integration. Almost every day, I go to our app on the App Store to check whether we got any new reviews. It became a routine morning task that I did while eating breakfast. One day, our marketing PM added LaunchKit to Slack, so every time someone reviewed our app, it would post to one of our slack channels. It wasn’t that much work for me to do it every day, but the fact that I didn’t have to do it anymore made me smile. Remember that thoughtful gift I talked about earlier? That’s what it felt like.
Why is it that you don’t have to make your product 10x better for people to switch? This works because people aren’t too strongly tied to the okay experience that the incumbent offers. Even if the incumbent offers a ton of functionality, a product that delivers a great experience can cause users to switch.
Look at existing services for your problem and figure out whether people feel passionate about it. If they don’t, then there could be a big opportunity there. Bring joy to the mundane, and you’ll be surprised to see that doing so can help your product win.
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