The two laws of building products

1. If you can’t sell it, don’t build it
2. If you can’t build it, don’t sell it

The single necessary and sufficient condition for a business, says MIT’s Bill Aulet, is a paying customer. But that’s not a sufficient requirement for a good business; instead, to use IDEO’s Tim Brown as a guide, we need to apply a ‘design thinking’ approach, finding the sweet spot of what is desirable to customers, technically feasible and commercially viable. Then we need to sell it, keep selling it and sell it some more.

Disclaimer: economic viability should be measured in your preferred currency. The value of your investments can go up as well as down. Bitcoin for illustration only.

Discovering this magical place takes either resilience and luck or discipline and rigour. Many successful businesses happened into their product/market fit through trial and error, which is one reason the failure rate for startups and small businesses is so high.

New ventures and products need to rapidly progress from high uncertainty to low as fast as possible (and with the smallest investment). To expedite the process of finding the solution that is desirable, feasible and viable, you need a team.

Three is the magic number. Four and five are also good.

There’s a vanishingly small chance of meeting a single person that can effectively challenge all three perspectives of your solution, and rare to find an entire startup team that…