This video emphasizes the importance of understanding the "Why" behind a product or company, hiring a strong team, and deeply understanding customers through qualitative and quantitative research.
What this video covers
Today we’re going to be talking about how to create a successful product.
Creating a successful product is the Holy Grail. Thinking about launching something, putting it out there on the market, how people are going to react. How do you iterate? How do you optimize? We’re going to cover everything in today’s video.
Everything starts with a Why. Why did you, in the first place, get started? Why are you trying to bring this to market? There are great people that have described in detail, their Why. Finding your Why, whether it’s your product, your service, your company; it’s everything.
So, basically, keeping your face and your eyes above the weeds so that you can see and so that you can execute. Again, you want to hire people that are better than you, people that can help you because, as the saying goes: you can go faster if you go alone, but you can go farther when you go together.
Then you need to know your customers very well. Essentially, who are they? Where are they? What is the problem that they’re experiencing? What will they get excited about? You want to do a lot of qualitative research and a lot of quantitative research so that you are able to understand whether it’s via phone calls, meetings, or data that maybe you even capture from surveys. You’re able to capture what they need, who they are.
Also, ask your customers what they want. Rather than you making assumptions, rather than investing all this money into the product, into bringing it to market, into technology, into development, or whatever that is, don’t execute based on assumptions. You should always execute based on data.
Like everything, you need to validate purchase intent. It doesn’t matter if someone is telling you that it looks cool, it looks great, they love it; if they are not able to get their wallet out, pull out the credit card, put money out, and buy it from you, you have nothing. Purchase intent is everything. Without purchase intent, there’s no success. Ultimately, what you want is to put it in front of people that don’t know you, that don’t care about you, and see if they’re willing to make a payment.
Then you also want to know your competition. What are your customers using? What are other alternatives? Why do they like those alternatives? A good way to do this is to survey your customers, either existing or potential customers, so that you know what’s out there in the market, why they like about it, and what you can make better than that.
Also, the user experience and the user interface are going to make all the difference. You want to design the experience. You want to design that onboarding, the retention, them seeing the high moment of it, and getting excited with what you’re doing. That’s going to be a really critical aspect.
The next thing is the branding and the pricing. The branding should go along the lines with the data that you’ve been able to collect from your customers. So if you know that your customers are going to be between 20 and 30, maybe you want to use a more young look and feel type of logo and branding.
On the pricing side, you want to do some price testing. The way that you go about that is, you start playing and testing with the price. You start to see that if you start at a certain point, and you continue to increase, eventually, once you’ve got to a certain place, there’s going to be a big falloff of customers.
Then simplicity and focus. There are a few things that you can master. You can’t do more than three things. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, but more than three things, execution is going to be super difficult. Again, you need to be super-focused; you need to go straight to the point, super-simple so that people get it, and also so that you don’t over-complicate your own execution.
Then, it’s all about scaling. What I mean about scaling is you need to figure out how you create a wheel that turns on its own, not by adding more people but by adding more money. Because if you add more money, for example, to marketing or to advertising, then that wheel turns on its own super nicely. That’s what it means to be able to scale, and being a scalable business where you’ve developed a model that is repeatable and scalable is the Holy Grail.
