“After I left John Sculley got a serious disease. It is the disease that thinking a really great idea is 90% of the work. The problem with that is there is a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product.” - Steve Jobs
A graveyard of products exists, fixated on superficial metrics and driven by speculative founders.
Greg has highlighted seemingly compelling myths that need to be demystified.
These myths are not supported by quantification, and unless you're an established multi-billion-dollar company or a founder adopting a quantitative approach, you won’t mitigate and I can literally predict your likely outcome, but hey you can too with effort.
Myth: A Feature Race
The real competition should be about benefits and value, not features.
Cloning features is easy, but matching value is challenging.
Humans biological imperative is to desire benefits, not features.
Myth: Bright Yellow Logo
Effective branding requires immense experience and expertise, not just a “bright logo”, that also can be pretty but ineffective and also infringe on the IP rights of others.
Qualitative data proves that effective branding is not easy, and those who say it is are ignorant of the difficulties. I’ve been a product designer who’s branded so many products in 20 years. It is not easy to do this well and continually.
Myth: Influencer Marketing
Don't waste resources on influencer marketing or any marketing until you've iterated and have improve your probability of achieving viability.
Myth: Business Model
Changing the business model is rarely the solution to anything, since an improved business model doesn’t drastically change your viability, which is what you postulated.
Yet Steve Jobs said all of this better then I could and let’s look at his words once again and be reminded of reality here folks:
“One of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left, John Scully got a very serious disease.
And that disease - I've seen other people get it too - it's the disease of thinking that really great idea is 90% of the work.
And that if you just tell all these other people, you know,
"Here's this great idea," then of course they can go off and make it happen.
And the problem with that is, is that there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product.
And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows.
It never comes out like it starts, because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it and you also find there is tremendous trade-offs that you have to make.
I mean, there are just certain things you can't make electrons do.
There are certain things you can't make plastics do or glass do or factories do or robots do.
And as you get into all these things, designing a product is keeping 5000 things in your brain - these concepts - and fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want.
And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
And it's that process that is the magic.” - Steve Jobs