Knowing when good enough is good enough: Reduce your time to market and sell more product

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Category: Product Development
Published on Sunday, 12 June 2011 09:41
Written by Le Digitale
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To sell the most product you have to design a product that solves a customer problem or meets a customer need, and make as many qualified buyers as possible aware of it.  Period. Yeah, I know - “Duh. Common sense.”  Common sense?  Oh really?  Let me continue before you complete your eye roll.  This means that when you sell a product, most customers don’t care what tools you used, if you’re using the latest technology, if you have an industry hot shot on your team, or that you’ve got a million patents.  Still think this is common sense?  If you understand when “good enough” is “good enough”; your time to market for digital products will be a lot faster than what it likely is today -- while the latest and greatest technology may not be a prerequisite for success online, time to market is.  A couple of examples:

Dating site PlentyOfFish.com
For those of you unfamiliar with PlentyOfFish.com’s (POF) success, he’s basically a guy who built a free dating site up from scratch and is pulling in $10 million money annually (~$5 million of it is net profit) via ad revenue.  When POF first started, aesthetically the site was absolutely awful, and both the technology and functionality was mediocre at best.  Why did so many people sign up for the site?  POF solved a customer need -- while dating sites might be a commodity, dating sites that didn’t require a membership fee were not.  By no means was the site beautiful, nor was it anywhere near the best dating site online in terms of functionality or number of users, but it was good enough and he made people aware of it via SEO -- this formula was good enough to make the creator $10MM annually through ad revenue.  You can read about POF at http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-in.html and better yet from his own typed words at http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-an-empire/.

January 2011: 14 year old writes a came that becomes the top free iPhone app
WIth over 3 million downloads, a kid from Spanish Fork, Utah - Robert Nay - hit the top of the download leader boards on the iPhone store.  This is less than a month after the game was approved for the Apple Store, and less than three months after he started developing the game.  How’d he do it?  He designed a game without any fancy graphics (but which is still a lot of fun), he used a tool that,“Makes it easy for beginners to create awesome games,” and of course he made it available through the Apple Store. 

Read these articles for more info: http://allthingsd.com/20110117/game-written-by-a-14-year-old-passes-angry-birds-as-top-free-iphone-app/ and http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/01/robert-nay-talks-bubble-ball-before-the-3-million-downloads/.

3. Robert Kiyosaki (just for perspective)
Anyone who has heard Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame speak for the first time, generally walks away with the same thought,”Wow, what a jerk.”  :-)  In all seriousness, the guy has built an amazing franchise and business model, and is someone every entrepreneur can learn from.  One of the best quotes I’ve ever heard was from Kiyosaki in response to those who mocked the quality of his writing style -- it was something to the effect of,”I’ve never wanted to be the best author, I’ve just wanted to be a best selling author.”  How could Robert’s approach to authoring, be integrated into your approach to developing new products?

Bottom line, if you have an idea that solves a consumer problem -- it doesn’t need to be perfect and amazing, it just needs to be good enough to meet their needs at the time.  Think about it.

Written by Le Digitale