It’s not just a provocative title – it’s true. When building a product – especially a consumer web product – it’s important to remember that your potential customers are busy. Take a look at a weeks worth of posts on TechCrunch or TechMeme – the number of new companies and new products is overwhelming. A byproduct of our creative and entrepreneurial culture is that we are collectively churning out massive numbers of new things for customers to try.
Given the noise of new and existing offerings that you are competing against, here are a few things that I think are critical to remember:
- Intersect customers where they already are – your potential customers are largely not going to come find you – you need to go find them where they already are. You can have the best product in the world but if you don’t have a good way to get that product to customers you are going to have a problem.
- Word of mouth (not viral) has more potential than it ever had: The good news is that – particularly for consumer web products – it’s vastly easier than it ever was for word to spread about great products. Twitter, Facebook, mass adoption of e-mail, digg, a massive number of blogs covering every last little niche and Google – both paid and organic – have created a massive distribution network that speeds word of mouth. The noise is vast but if you excite customers, word spreads far faster than it ever did in the past. That’s certainly a part of why we are now seeing companies capture massive numbers of customers in just a few years (it’s still not a few months) where it used to take a decade or more for most. Think of local reviews as an example. In the past decade CitySearch grew and became massive and within the same decade Yelp overtook it.
- You have ten seconds to explain yourself. Once you find the customer where they are and they come to your site, how clear is your offering? How many websites have you gone to where you can’t figure out in the first 10 seconds what it is they do and why you should care? I’m guessing you don’t stick around for several more minutes trying to figure it out. Everyone already knows and trusts Amazon – not much, if any, explanation is needed. Further, customers are willing to invest a certain amount of their time to hear what Amazon has to say when it wants to announce something new. Apple is obviously the extreme of this where their fans wait with baited breath for the latest pronouncements from Cupertino and the supreme leader, Steve Jobs. But you are not – yet – Amazon or Apple and so the vast majority of people who get to your home page are a) new and have no idea what you have to offer them and b) going to give you about ten seconds to explain to them what you do. Use the time wisely.
- Doing well at the first ten seconds is not a license to overwhelm your users with features. Most sites fail – badly – at the first ten seconds. A few – like Mint.com do a great job. But beneath the first ten seconds, the functionality has to unfold elegantly. You can’t just dump a ton of “features” on your users. Paul Buccheit, the original creator of Gmail described this eloquently:
… While developing Gmail, we implemented a lot of features that were either not released, or not released until much later. Some of the most interesting ideas (such as automatic email prioritization) never made it out because we couldn’t find simple enough interfaces. Other ideas sounded good, but in practice weren’t useful enough to justify the added complexity (such as multiple stars). Other features, such as integrated IM, simply needed more time to get right and were added later. Our approach was somewhat minimal: only include features that had proven to be highly useful, such as the conversation view and search. It’s my impression that Wave was released at an earlier stage of development — they included all of the features, and will likely winnow and refine them as Wave approaches a full launch.
- Your customer cares about the person they love the most – that’s not you. When speaking to them, talk about what’s in it for them instead of what you’ve done. Benefits, not specs and features. As engineers we tend to be pretty bad at this – we build something really cool and get enamored with it and so we want to tell everyone about all the cool stuff we’ve built. The problem is that your customer does not really care about what the product has in it – they care about what it does for them. Among the many things that Apple understood with their launch of the iPod this was an important one. Whereas their competitors were engaged in a speeds and feeds price war, Apple simplified the product and talked about what was in it for the consumer; “being cool and different” was a critical part of the sell. Everyone else was trying to impress the consumer with how many gigabytes they had packed into their latest device.
- You are not just competing against your competitors - you are competing against all the other things that your customer might spend their day doing – all the products that can substitute for yours even if they do something entirely different. Music sites don’t just compete against music – they also have to compete against blogs, Facebook and video sites to name a few. This is all the more true if the product requires the user to adopt a new behavior (hunch is a good example of this) instead of just improving their experience with an existing behavior (which is where Oyster plays). Excepting for the power of novelty – which I’ll expand on in a later post – consumers tend to learn new behaviors very slowly. (anyone remember the Go corporation founded in the late 80s?)
