Good products vs Bad products
I am Aarihant Aaryan! Welcome to the Iron sharpen Iron newsletter,
I share my homework from my startup journey every week, learning about human behavior, and sometimes decoding industries and business models for fun.
I can’t control my curiosity :) )
I love building products, have built too many products in last 1 to 2 year
Honestly had many failures than wins, I learned a few priceless lessons and observations that might help you to build better products.
Good products always communicate the purpose with clarity, no big jargon used, they don't make the end-user think a lot.
Bad Products don't communicate the purpose it has, because the product itself hasn't figured it out. Good products are like virus, they travel faster, one user keeps talking and bragging about it to the other user it only happens when the product is communicating its core use case.
Good products solve for one use case at the beginning and later on build/integrate multiple use cases, Bad products want to solve for 101 things in a single launch.
Good products look sexy irrespective of who their target audience is and where they come from.
Bad products don't focus on beauty, it uses the persona of the user as an excuser, remember irrespective of where we come from, we love sexy things, humans are attracted by the beauty.
There is a reason why people give a lot of offerings at larger temples compared to smaller temples. It is because the experience they have in the temple changes how they perceive themselves. When people are in large temples, it makes them feel small in the presence, hence they end up giving more.
Remember what brings a person to your product should be one use-case, what keeps him can be multiple use cases. Ex: People get on cred to pay bills, what keeps them? there are diff reasons for this.
Good products are very selective in the features / LOB they launch as they want those features to solve for retention or monetization
Bad products always assume that building features will solve major product problems,
but in reality, they don't it makes the problem worse - Andrew chen calls this a feature fallacy you can see the how the conversion looks like for bad products.
Good products have the ability to attract so much distribution, that they can turn products or businesses into features in their core products. Products like cameras, music, calendar, and calculator are features now.
Bad products will transition from a business to a feature in good products.
Good Products are built from a deeper understanding of human behavior and
solve for engagement
Bad products are more focused on the transaction from the user, that they sacrifice engagement and the aspect of building a relationship with the user.
Good products are like movies - they come from good directors (Product managers)
they launch the only one movie in a year or a year and a half, but it turns out to be a big hit.
Bad products are like short films - they launch so many films that rarely one becomes a hit.
Final thoughts: Good product is an outcome of entire experience not just product experience
Onboarding, Customer support have to be well cracked.