There’s a wordy post on The Equity Kicker about how to think about product (in terms of Seedcamp).
The point that caught my attention more than others was:
Find the ‘nub’ of your product and only build stuff that fits with that. You should be able to capture the ‘nub’ in a single sentence. If you find yourself wanting to build stuff that doesn’t fit with the nub then it is probably time to re-examine it….
With Infurious, we have four guiding principles and this coincides with one of them. We want to create products that people will use to solve problems. Some of these will be problems we’ve had and we’ve built the solution to solve that. When you look at the list of apps that we intend to build eventually, it would seem we have a lot of itches that need scratched. The truth is: collectively we have a lot of experience in our markets as users and, perhaps more relevantly, as troubleshooters and consultants. The apps we build are maybe not for scratching an itch we have but they’re certainly itch points, or in some cases, pain points for customers.
I guess what the quote says is that you have to define the itch. What does a product do? In simple layman terms.
SyncBridge, for example, allowed the sharing of calendars with friends and colleagues. Other apps just remove pain points that we’ve witnessed (and I’m waiting for one of the guys to finish a blog post on the next product).
The mantra: Do One Thing Really Well is really a paraphrasing of the UNIX way and, to a lesser degree, the Mac way. I find there’s a surprising correlation between the two though on paper they used to be such diametric opposites. I grew up in a culture of UNIX + Mac = Computers.
I’m excited about some of the things coming because they scratch an itch I have and I’m even more excited about the pain points we can remove for some of the customers I have in Mac-Sys.