Here’s an anti-pattern all too often seen: a good programmer, sick unto death of being a corporate codemonkey, starts a microISV and immediately do the wrong thing: they build a safe product.
It might be a software library or component, or a CMS system not unlike all the other CMS systems out there, only better. It could be YADO (yet another digital organizer) or god forbid, a FTP or RSS client.
They code it well, cobble together an adequate or more than adequate web site and wait for the sales to roll in. And wait. And wait. Desperate, they look for some magic to apply – a Google AdWords campaign, a blog, something to get people interested. Nothing works.
It’s not a pretty picture.
Where they went wrong was by giving into the all too human urge to play things safe, go with a proven winner, copy the leader, do a me too but better product or web site. They’ve seen their former employers and companies with all those people working in the office building ever day somehow selling crap what looks like every other company’s stuff and make the very expensive mistake of “code monkey see, code monkey do”.
You need to go play where it’s not safe; to do things differently than they do from the product you develop to the way you connect to your market to how you do tech support. Expecting a tiny startup to succeed doing the things an established company does to succeed is like expecting fish to wear shoes.
Here’s why you don’t want to come out with a “safe” app:
- Wanted: new pain. If a pain has been around a while, you can bet someone is selling a cure for that pain and their marketing/advertising budget is hundred times more than you can charge on your credit cards. On the other hand, there’s new pains being invented every day, ripe for the solving by nimble micro firms.
- The Anti HeadOn. HeadOn bludgeoned its way into our brains and into the top 10 of external analgesics in just two years by spending about a bezillion bucks on advertising. You will never be able to do this, so why build a product that requires that kind of advertising to be successful?
- Old news isn’t news. New products solving new problems are remarkable; new products solving old problems are not. You want – you need – to be remarkable to spark the interest of bloggers, editors and customers.
If you’re trying to define your product or web service and your starting to get a little nervous about the whole prospect, now is the time to lean even further forward: playing it safe isn’t safe when you’re a microISV.
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{ 6 comments }
Great post! So true and something to remember when brainstorming.
Great article.
There is also the way of solving old problems in new ways.
Making it simpler, for example. 37 Signals are the masters of this approach: http://www.37signals.com/getreal/
I’m glad you’re back to blogging, Bob! This was another great post.
Ged – new ways of solving old problems definitely works! It’s doing the safe, conventional thing that will get you in trouble
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Man, is that ever true. I’m reading this right now from my own RSS reader that I wrote after I left my corp job. I’m still glad I wrote it and I learned a lot and got a bunch of nice code to reuse but I’m also glad I eventually put it on the backburner and started working on something a little more inspiring.
Hmmm, smells Seth Godin.
I have to slightly disagree with you. “Safe” is actually “being everything to everyone”. I don’t think this necessarily has to do with solving old problems.
The reality is that the days of “mainstream”, “factory produced”, “one size fits all” products are gone, thanks to the advances in communication technologies and the low or no-cost tools. No more mass production. This of course includes marketing too. Mass production was the ways of the industrial age, and it served its purpose. Now we are in the information age, or perhaps something else altogether.
So if you don’t want to be safe, pick a customer base that you can really truly understand and serve, at the expense of all others. Then, if you are lucky, if these people like what you do, find you remarkable and talk about you to their friends, then all others may hear of you as well…
And read Seth Godin!
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