July 8th, 2011
Getting Excited About New Products
Anthony V. wrote a kickass post about excitement around new businesses/products/ideas. Several people have posted follow-ups and they’ve been totally fascinating reading. And it’s Friday and it’s raining – an excellent time to be introspective.
I think it’s important to first differentiate between products and ideas. I am focusing this post around products because there are so many poorly-implemented great ideas and equally as many excellently-implemented shitty ideas. This is all implementation.
So what makes a new product great? Here are my thoughts:
1. Products that make a difficult process genuinely and obviously easier.
Something that makes some process exponentially easier is bound to make people excited. I remember when Amazon came out with 1click – they took a multi-step process and made it a single click. That, to me, was super exciting.
There are so many examples in this category, but three that I use every day are Dropbox (sharing and syncing!!), Gmail (speed!!), and Grooveshark (playlists in my browser!!).
2. Something that makes me want to come back.
“Repeat Visitors” is an interesting concept because so many products force these numbers with annoying emails, push notifications and spam.
You should come back because you want to – because there is some feature that is calling you back. It is a rare, rare thing when you return to a site organically. I am totally fine with reminders (bacn, etc.) as part of your product, but just make sure that the reminder has value to the end-user and not just to your traffic stats.
3. Magic.
This is the hardest quality to articulate – the one that so few services actually deliver on. Showing me information or giving me an experience not previously accessible or possible is part of magic.
Maybe an anecdotal example is better. I remember the first time I looked at Twitter, I felt like I could see INSIDE A PERSON’S BRAIN. At least, the people who were doin it right.
Flipboard. Delicious. YouTube. You get the idea.
These products are magic.
I don’t think there’s really any ideas that are truly new — “magic” is all about the technology itself or a new way to layout information or a color scheme or a new twist on a very established idea.
True excitement takes all three – not just one. But it’s also extremely difficult to architect and can’t be manufactured because of all the circumstances that are out of the control of the founders – market timing, early users, etc.
When I am using something new I try to think about it in terms of these three qualities.
While it is extremely difficult to create excitement and amazing experiences, the upside, satisfaction and potential impact are nearly infinite. And that’s why we all keep trying.