A product's journey or how to keep a product alive through the years.
Keeping a product alive often seems like the sole purpose of an entrepreneur. So much of your time is
dedicated to figuring out how to keep the ship from sinking that you can quickly lose perspective
on why you began the journey in the first place. To understand a product's life cycle
we must begin with: Where do products start?
A product is usually
conceived after a personal need sparks an idea of a product to solve it. That person is typically the founder, or founders, who
by virtue of having an ample understanding of the problem have the best chance at providing a solution to it.
After this initial spark,
the idea has to be validated in order to confirm that the problem affects a critical mass of people.
This will determine whether or not a business is viable for that specific set of needs.
After validating the idea, your product is ready to be developed, tested and launched.
This is, of course, easier said than done and I'm fast forwarding numerous steps
which would include: assembling a team, building an MVP,
testing your product, initial marketing efforts and so on.
We have several videos that cover these topics and I'll link those below.
But say you already made your product available to your market and you already signed up your first thousand users.
One would think that after all this validating and having built a solid product your job as a founder is done
and you can just cash the check at the end of every month.
But you'll soon realize people aren't as willing to pay for your product as they first said they were.
For most first-time entrepreneurs
money will flow in very slowly and very unpredictably.
This can be nerve-racking and can put an insane amount of stress over your shoulders.
For most founders the answer to that question is
What that means is: To what degree does your product satisfy a strong market need?
It's very likely that the first versions of your product will fail to satisfy people's demands.
Because understanding these needs
properly and providing an adequate solution is too damn hard.
Nailing down your value proposition
one that users are willing to pay for, can take months. Years, even.
Unless you're some kind of entrepreneurial god or you got very lucky
you will lose your first beloved customers.
Either because they weren't the right kind of customers for you
or because your product simply wasn't ready. Or ultimately
you were not the right kind of solution for them.
That is a tough pill to swallow.
But on the upside you'll learn so much from them that it'll make up for the money you fail to collect from them.
Which takes me to the next point...
Because you will have a better understanding of your audience's needs.
Because you'll learn
you were targeting the wrong people and there's a better fit for your product than the one you initially intended.
Because the technology you implemented two years ago will become obsolete
and because the race against your competitors will force you into
innovating and implementing new solutions to the problem
you set out to fix. Our product team often
gets asked what they do on a daily basis since our product is already live and running.
Through the last five years
our product team has constantly released new features, bug fixes
and product improvements. And a new version of the tool is pushed live almost
every other week.
While some of these changes are simply "the tool is working as it should be" or "better and faster",
some of them unlock a whole new layer of possibilities. And that goes beyond your product itself.
You'll realize that in order to keep your product alive, you'll need to become incredibly
adaptable in pretty much all fronts of your company.
How you market your product?
Where you advertise it?
Who you target it to?
How you price it? All of these things will undergo tremendous changes.
You need to embrace the unknown and have the will to question your own
hypotheses and reinvent yourself entirely, if needed. Take our product
for example. We set out to help users build better presentations.
Easier and faster.
We wanted to help end users who were seeking an alternative to presentation tools
they hated using and were stuck with for years.
While the spirit of that claim is valid to this day,
many things have changed since then. We went from freemium to premium
realizing our business model was just
unsustainable with the former model. We understood that
competing with the big sharks for end-users was going to be a death race for us.
And we went for specific market niches instead.
Catering startups and small medium businesses the tool perfectly tailored to their needs.
Accordingly, our product has changed drastically over the years.
From the user interface to its back-end technology...
We've had to change almost every single bit of the platform.
That has probably been the key to our success.
We didn't get stuck on our idea of what our business had to be and
instead became what our business needed to be, in order to serve our customers properly.
Obviously, without
compromising on our own vision and core company beliefs.
Our latest product novelty revolves around the use of artificial intelligence and machine
learning to design users slides. An innovation we couldn't possibly dream of a few years ago.
The new slide editor will be able to factor in millions of graphic variables at once
and provide optimized solutions to people's
presentations. These kind of innovations have been
critical to our success and have allowed us to outlive many other tools that have perished
along the way. It's crazy how differently, for the
most part differently meaning better, things have turned out for us.
You'll make these grandiose plans about the products you build when you see them in 5, 10 years.
But the truth is there's an unspoken fear of not being able to deliver on what you're promising.
Of being too optimistic
about the projections you make for your business.
But in the end, what we've come to realize is that these plans and business projections
are not meant to predict what will happen.
But rather, set a path for your company. Whether you meet them or not is something irrelevant.
What matters is: how much
wanting to meet those goals will be an engine to move your product forward
and adapt it to the many challenges it'll certainly face.