Ask HN: How do you generally build a product?

The conversation centered around how to create a category but I think the process applies to side projects as well.

Copy/paste from Google doc didn't work well on mobile so here's a link to the doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F0ex-c-vmitYQiDnSSODUZCW...

Michel’s playbook

Look for 3 big shifts in the buyer’s world

Conduct day in the life interviews

Asking When you walk in in the morning, what is the first thing you do every day? How many applications do you log into? What applications do you love and why? If there was a problem I could solve for you, what would it be and why? Who do you report to What are you MBOs

Looking for

What did they do all day What did they love What did they perceive as pain What were they promoted for if they did well What are their challenges in their interactions with their boss

Make sure you understand

Technology landscape Daily work life Responsibilities / mission

Look for patterns in the data

Common pains / problems Value attached to solving it

Find a gap you can solve

What’s the value to the user? What’s the impact on the organization? What’s the ROI of the impact? Value of solving?

Market

Start with a bottoms up TAM

How much do I think they’ll pay me for this? Shoot for 10% of the value, eventually. If I achieve 20% share of the market, is it a $1 billion company?

Then do a top down TAM

If I could redirect 1% of category spending, what would that be? $100b TAM = great for B2B, $1t for B2C?

Product

Break down what you’re going to build

Is it defensible enough from the way our competitors are currently doing things? Is there mental space for a new Kleenex? Whiteboard the solution

Identify 3 core capabilities you must build

See what’s out there for each of these How difficult is it to build each? How defensible is it?

Time horizon

Is anyone out there doing anything close to this?

Positioning / differentiated narrative

Can you define the narrative? How difficult is it to copy? How different is the platform? Can you get your competitors to sell on your narrative? Ex. No Software, Inbound Marketing, Conversational Marketing

Value

Early days you’ll only get 1% of the value you create As you grow, you’ll have more leverage and will be able to slowly bring that up to 10%

I'd rather wait till I have a whole day or weekend to devote to it, and go very very hard.

Regarding the product idea, it varies from an itch I have, to a neat idea but I’m not the target audience, so I ask around (esp. on Reddit), to someone asking me to make them something and I ask if instead of billing my hourly rate, I can sell them a productized service. I jot down my “itch I have” ideas regularly in a to-do app.

I’ve tried building the product without designing it first (jumping straight to code) and I’ve found that it has always been a mess (re-designing multiple times in code).

I now design the concept first (in Sketch) and only once it feels right, I get implementing. I create a basic styleguide and reusable symbols, which I reuse throughout the app/product.

Then I get implementing. Once I have something that starts to work, I tease it out on Twitter/Reddit and see if people like it. If it gains steam, it gives me enough wind under my wings to continue developing it.

I give myself X amount of time to ship (otherwise the project takes forever).

Once “done”, I send it to a few friends using TestFlight/MS AppCenter for beta testing.

If all goes well I prepare a launch page and launch on ProductHunt.

Depending on the niche I communicate with bloggers on launch day (a big chunk of my buyers are referred from these blogs even years later).

Regarding time and idea picking:

I just do what I’m psyched about, whenever I want. I’m lucky to have financial security at the moment.

What I wish I had in a partner:

Someone who can complement my skills: someone better at design who can still develop.

I’ve already talked with dev acquaintances about teaming up for weekend projects. Would definitely be fun and I don’t care as much about getting 100% of the pie.

The to-do list:

I put almost everything in a to-do, but only check it towards the last 20% of the project. I tag everything as e.g. Design, Client, Server, Marketing. Once the MVP “feels” done, I go through the list to see what’s missing.

Create it for you, solve your problems, chances are you are among a group of people that share the same issues and the work will be "where do this people group together?"

Creating a company in a cosmetic field was challenging, but I do believe it's something feasable for everyone as long as you accept the fact that you must delegate part of the work.

I still think that this might be true for the dev field, so yeah, as many other pointed out: Build a decent MVP that solve a problem, share it with the people who care.

Obviously, for me, turning into a product means "making some money", otherwise you're simply testing. So, the process to get from "I have an idea" to "I have a product" might vary a lot.

I started saying "Scratch your own itch" because if you are not solving something you care about and you are infatuated by an idea, doing the market research, finding what the ideal customer really wants is hard. Instead, if you are the first customer of your product and use it daily it's much easier to find pitfalls, problems, defects and so on.

From there, a good advice I always found is trying to sell it to the circle of people you know even before selling online. If none of them buy the product (note the word "Buy". don't give it away for free) there's a good chance something is off. Yes, they might not be your target user, but I would bet that you should at least have a friend that shares part of your interests.

As for how to choose ideas: We have limited time, so I invest in the one with the higher probability of success and leave the others in a list. What happens is that, from time to time (rarely but not so much), I'll see someone else came up and made money with a similar idea. I'll bite my finger, smile, and move on :D Afterall what counts is not the idea alone, it's the execution. That will -always- make the difference.