Jakob Nielsen is someone you need to track. Jacob for more years than I can count has been a leading authority on Useability - the arcane but important study of why some apps are easy to use, and some are not.
Today on his blog, Jakob lists his “Top 10 Application Design Mistakes” and if you write code for a living you had better read this post, print it, read it in the bathroom the next two weeks, reprint it and glue it to the wall you look at when your designing because it’s that good.
Now these are really good mistakes to avoid in general, but they’re not the errors that microISVs sometimes make that doom their product. The errors Jakob talks about can be fixed in a few hours or days; the following errors are much, much worse.

Top 6 Fatal Application Design Mistakes MicroISV Make

The Me-Too Product. You decide it’s time to stop slaving for other people and launch your own product. What product will it be? A CMS or online community of course! Why? There’s a lot of them and you might have worked on or with one at your day job. Why not? Because there’s no reason for customers to buy your product versus any other product - no differentiation, no solving a specific market’s problems. Now sometimes you can beat the competition solely on the basis of how well you execute - but that’s the whole of your execution that the customer sees. Marketing, Advertising, PR, Tech Support and product being the smallest part of the whole package.

The Play it Safe Product. A variation of the above. You decide to create a new app, look at the similar apps, and make your app look and feel like those apps, with the same features so you compare well in a “speeds and feeds” comparison chart. Playing it safe isn’t safe for microISVs. Your product needs to be remarkable to generate interest because you can’t afford traditional advertising as a way of bludgeoning your way into people’s heads.

The Only a Programmer Could Love this Product. This is a product that has every feature, option and property imaginable, just like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. Oh wait - both those products are over a decade old - and they’ve ended up with more features than Squeaky my cat has hair. Don’t do that. Instead, make your best stab at what your market really, really will pay attention to in the way of a new solution, then iterate from there.

The There’s no Market Product. Uhh - Market? For purposes of microISVs, a market is a Internet defined group of people who have a specific problem relevant to them they are prepared to pay money to solve. By Internet defined, I mean:

• There are search terms they would use in Google that would help them find solutions - like your product or SaaS,
• There are bloggers who have a passion/rage/interest in this problem who will remark about solutions they are made aware of - like your product or SaaS.
• There are social networks or groups of people on large social networks like Facebook who have this problem and will be interested and excited about new solutions - like your product or SaaS.

The General Problem Product. You come up with a solution to a problem you think everyone has - at least everyone who sits in front of a computer. But the problem is your product has such a huge market it really has no market at all. You see, the problems people have had in general haven’t changed that much much since Dynastic Egypt: get laid, make money. (he says semi-seriously). What you need as a microISV is a very specific problem you can solve for a very specific bunch of credit card carrying humans very well.

The I Can Do it Better Than Microsoft Product. Oy! Yes, you probably can. Just look at the dog’s barf of binary formats Microsoft has to use. There’s only one problem - you can’t sell better than Microsoft. And the history of this industry is littered with the bones of startups who thought they could - or stuck a toothpick up the giant’s ass, or just got squashed dead flat when Microsoft rolled over them without even noticing they where there. Sure, once in a very great while a company will come along that through sheer brilliance, perseverance and luck beats Microsoft at its own game - SourceGear comes to mind - but it’s the exception that proves the iron rule you don’t want to get microISV whacked with.

If you’re realizing you’ve made one or more of these mistakes with your microISV product - chin up, they can be recovered from. It won’t be easy, but it can be done. If you’re in microISV design mode - I’d strongly suggest you keep them in mind. You’ll be glad you did.

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