6 Essential Laws for Building Successful Products

After being involved in the development of several successful (and unsuccessful) software products, I propose the following 6 principles that will help you improve your chances to succeed (and waste less time and money trying).

Validating:

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to validate your idea before starting to build your product. This will help you make sure you are building the right product before actually building it.
Don't be afraid to involve potential users in this stage. You can easily create a fast prototype revealing your application's main feature and see to which extent it raises interest.
A good technique is creating a landing page showcasing your product and its main features before actually building it, and see how many people sign up for the waiting list. If people are not interested, you should identify what went wrong and adjust.

Doing one thing right:

Why will people be paying for your product? What problem does it solve? The answer to these questions is where you should focus. All the nice to haves have no place on your MVP; leave them for future releases.

Start small

Building the right product is more important than building the product right. In this instance, it is ok to cut corners or even use no-code platforms if you don't have a technical background. If your product gains traction, there is always time to migrate to a more performant platform or stack, and you will be more confident to invest.
Focusing on doing one thing right and starting small will help you shorten the time-to-market, diminishing the risk of someone else launching a similar product before you. It also means you will receive valuable feedback from your users earlier.

Being open to feedback

User feedback is among the most critical insights; it will help define the path for improvements and new features for your product. One to one, 10 minutes sessions work best, but surveys are useful too. Tackle broad questions like "What do you like about the product?" "What could the product do better?"

Tracking and measuring

Defining key performance indicators (KPI) form an early stage is a great idea, and it will help you track the impact of every marketing effort, changes, and new features. It will also help you better understand what your users are doing and where they see the value. Basic KPIs can be engagement, active usage, user acquisition, etc.

Iterating

Keep moving and improving your product one step at a time, experiment new things, and always base your decisions in real evidence (feedback and KPI's). Moving fast will let you get ahead of your competitors and provide gradually more value for your users, that's why they are using your product and staying.