Create & Scale | 03. Turning Your Vision into a Product

The third step in creating and scaling a product is turning your vision into a product. This is the part where you determine what people want and start building it.

It’ll probably be a crummy product at first, but you have to start somewhere.

Your goal during this step is gap identification and resolution. You want to figure out all the different ways your idea misses the mark in terms of what the market needs/wants. The sooner you do that, the sooner you can get to work on adjusting your vision to meet demand.

Depending on the problem, the market, and your experience, this step could be a one-off, but, most likely, you’ll need to repeat it several times to get to the right product.

A Note on The Largeness of This Step

Dozens of books and hundreds of blog posts have been written on this step alone.

Eric Ries built his early career on evangelizing just one part of this step.

This piece can’t cover that kind of ground. We do hope, combined with the reading list below, it will serve as a solid primer and go-to launchpad resource.

You may not need the reading list at all if you’re familiar with startups. But if you’re a small business owner or prospective entrepreneur doing this for the first time, everything linked below is critical for learning how to utilize startup methodologies to create and scale products.

Building things is hard

Why Do You Want to Build a Product?

Before you dive into building a product, try answering this question. Be honest with yourself about the reason(s) you want to bring this product into the world.

Below are a few common reasons people build products, cribbed from Ries:

• To delight customers
• To attract lots of customers
• To make a lot of money
• Because you have a big vision; You want to change the world

It’s a short, yet critically important list. Knowing why you’re doing this will help you repeatedly along the way (especially when you’re in the middle of a 100 hour week, haven’t cashed a paycheck in 9 months, and can’t remember the last time you saw the sun).

Market over everything

The Only Thing That Matters

Your idea is important. So is your vision. But don’t get stuck thinking about them too narrowly. That’s the biggest trap founders and entrepreneurs fall into.

As Dave Morin puts it in his piece Get Out of the Way, “Often times when you are building the first version of a product, you develop strong, dogmatic, thinking around what the initial use case might be.”

Your idea will change as you go and it needs to be flexible.

Morin provides more insight into the importance of letting users define your product:

Often times, users think about your product in very different ways, and indeed use it in fascinating and curious ways. Users hack your product to make it do what they want it to do. You have to search deeply for these behaviors and hacks, unlock them, and then, Get Out Of The Way.

In other words, don’t trick yourself into thinking users will conform to your product. Instead, focus on trying to build a product your users want (or, better still, a product they need).

If people won’t use it or pay for it, there’s no point in wasting time, energy, and money making it.

By way of Marc Andreessen, consider Andy Rachleff’s Law of Startup Success:

The #1 company-killer is lack of market. Andy puts it this way:

When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.

When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.

When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.

Your team and your product can never be as important as finding the right market. Or, as Andreessen says, “Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are.”

Andreessen’s pieces on the importance of the market also reference Rachleff’s Corollary of Startup Success: The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.

Product-market-fit, which means, as Andreessen puts it, “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

In other words, there has to be a market for your product AND your product has to nail it.

Even if there is a market for your product, you can’t just chuck anything out there and expect it to work.

Like all things in life, if you want to build products well, you’ll need a process

Methodology and Best Practices

Lay out a clear, repeatable process, and do it as many times as necessary.

The process we recommend for turning your vision into a product is based on the Lean Startup methodology. (We recommend reading the articles and books linked at the bottom of this piece to better understand this process.)

Creating a Product

1. Market Validation — Do people have this problem?
2. Proof of Concept — Can you build the solution?
3. Pretotyping — The art and science of faking it before making it. Are you building the solution right?
4. Prototyping — How will you build the solution?
5. Building an MVP — Should you build this solution?
6. Testing the MVP — What do users/customers think?
7. Documenting and analyzing collected data — What did we learn?
8. Iteration on the MVP — The data told us the market wants something else, but what does it want?
9. Repeat, from step 5, ‘Building an MVP’ — Should you build this other solution?

Eric Ries, mentioned a few times above and the author of Lean Startup, provides a good visualization of the above (steps 1–5 fall into the ‘Build’ bubble in the graphic; 6–7 fall into the ‘Measure’ and ‘Data’ bubbles; 8–9 are the ‘Learn’ and ‘Idea’ bubbles).

Again, the most common trap people (even experienced entrepreneurs and founders) fall into while building a new product is thinking their idea is somehow different than all of the great ideas that came before.

It’s easy to think your idea is so good that if you can get enough money and time to build it the way you envision it, it will somehow just sell.

The truth is that none of the great ideas you’re thinking of (in tech, startups, or any other industry) took off without lots and lots of iteration.

Although the mythology is that Facebook was an easy, runaway success, even they followed aspects of the methodology above. And Nike was a distribution company for Tiger, a Japanese sneaker company, for years before they started making their own shoes.

If you listen carefully enough, the market will tell you how to turn your idea into a great product, but you have to quiet your own mind enough to hear what it’s telling you.

Recap

We started with Dave Morin, so let’s finish up with another quote from him:

In times where you are wondering where next to go to unlock your vision, look to your users and be open with your thinking. Don’t let dogma stand in the way of giving the users what they want. And then, Get Out Of The Way.

We can’t say this enough: The only thing that matters is the market.

You may not understand the market now, and you may never understand it. But the best way to start understanding the market — if there is one —as well as what it wants, is to dive in and start talking to users and potential users.

Reading List

Blog and Short-Form Pieces

• Get Out of the Way, Dave Morin
• The Only Thing That Matters, Marc Andreessen
• Proof of Concept vs. Prototype vs MVP, Ben Oliveri
• Minimum Viable Product, a Guide, Eric Ries
• What Is A Minimum Viable Product And How To Build It Right
• If Your Product is Great, it Doesn’t have to be Good, Paul Buchheit
• Product Hunt Began as an Email List, Ryan Hoover
• Why The Lean Start-Up Changes Everything?
• We Don’t Sell Saddles Here, Stewart Butterfield
• What’s the Difference Between a Prototype and an MVP

Books

• The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
• Pretotype It, Alberto Savoia
• Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore
• Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love, Marty Cagan

Start small, grow your user base intentionally & incrementally so you can collect, manage, & analyze data

What Next?

Famously, Slack was in beta for 9 months. The Slack team developed their product methodically, incrementally adding more and more people to their experiment as they went.

You’re going to want to keep testing and refining your product, expanding its reach as you go. If you give a product that’s not ready to the market you can stunt your growth, kill your momentum, blow your launch, or disappoint users who come en masse to use a product that isn’t ready for the lode.

On the other hand, there is no real downside to taking it slow.

Some will argue that you don’t want to get eclipsed by competitors so you have to move fast. In some instances, that’s true. Just not as often as people think.

Sticking with the Slack example, they had Yammer and others either on its coattails or ahead of it. But Slack did a better job than the rest at listening to their users and building the right product to solve the pervasive problem in the market, as opposed to trying to build the fastest product to market.

If you have the resources, you don’t want to rush this next step in the process. If you don’t have the resources, get them. Either way, take your time.

We’ll walk you through Testing and Refining your Product in the next Create & Scale installment (number 4 already!).

Note

In the intro to this the first two pieces of this series we noted that we’d utilize our own startup idea to help develop and illustrate the ideas we’re writing about.

Although that device worked in the last piece, as we tried to incorporate that same concept into this piece we realized that approach was unnecessarily overcomplicating things.

Our initial idea was an exciting one, but it wasn’t making for very good reading.

We’re still testing and playing around with that idea (a fitness app that allows users to put their routes on fantasy maps and share with friends — so you can see your jog around the neighborhood as it would look in the Mariner Valley on Mars), we’re just not going to force it into these pieces.

Our goal for this series is to create a group of essays that can act as an all-in-one manual for anyone who wants to make a product. We believe we can achieve our goal easier by simplifying it, but we’re open to feedback.