Building product

This post is inspired by advice to a fellow entrepreneur. Now all I need to do is follow it myself.

2023-09-27

While attempting to build a product, one thing that I got wrong was not narrowing my focus down to a particular set of users. Narrowing down is counterintuitive — founders are supposed to think about scale!

But, when I look at a Facebook and marvel at billions of users, I forget that seeds of success were laid while targeting a few thousand.

If you have access to a few hundred of your prospective users, you have a natural advantage. What one or two (not even three!) problems do they have, that you feel compelled to solve? And are those problems among the enterprises' top five?

For example, I get a ton of unsoliciated emails from recruitment agencies. But my firm hires less than 5 employees a year. A bigger recruitment pipeline is valuable, but not critical; I am a poor target for these agencies. They would be better served by targeting firms that — driven by high growth or high — hire every week (or at least every month).

So, which subset of your prospective users share a common, burning need that you can build for? Something that virtually ensures that they will use what you have built every ? Something as useful to them as the alarm clock app is to me?

And before you build anything, how much can you fake-build? Here is a self-gratifying example.

In the early days of Lattice, someone asked if we could build them a "auto-pharmacy". The conversation went something like this.

"Can you build us a drug dispensing machine? Something we can place in a high traffic locations like metro stations."

"Yes, sure! It will take 4 days. How soon can you get a clearance from the Delhi Metro authorities?"

"4 days!?"

"4 days. But it will only work with cash."

"But how?"

"I'll make a box and stand inside it. When someone pushes a button, and inserts cash, I will dispense medicines and return any change."

The conversation quickly wrapped up after that.

And for doing all this, you do not need to know how to write a single line of code. You need to live and breathe your users.

Footnotes