Build it and they'll come isn't true, but it should be
Recently I've been moving further and further away from the idea of "build it and they'll come" (BIATC). As I do so, I'm noticing something in myself that I really don't like.
If we rewind however many months ago where I believe more in BIATC, when I see examples in the world of BIATC not working, I would have the thoughts:
This is broken. This is not the way things are supposed to work. This makes me upset.
Now, my response is more:
Well, yeah. That's the way things work. Deal with it. You have to figure out a way to do marketing and customer acquisition just like everyone else. That's your responsibility.
I don't like this new response.
It's one thing to understand the way the world works. In this case, that BIATC isn't true. But it's another thing entirely to consider it natural and acceptable. When you consider it natural and acceptable, you don't view it as broken. When you don't view it as broken, you don't try to fix it. I think that's a problem.
I would love to live in the world where, somehow, there's this giant version of Consumer Reports available to the public, for free, for every possible product and service, with reliable rankings of best-to-worst, based on what criteria are important to you. I think that in this world, BIATC would be a lot more true. Sure, things like brand and familiarity would still move the needle to some extent, but I think that things would be totally different from the way they are now. Better products would win, lesser products would lose, there would be pressure to offer more and more value to customers, and starting businesses would become doable for way more people.
It reminds me of how with web apps, now you don't have to deal with things like setting up servers, and now you have awesome frameworks that offer a higher level of abstraction, making development easier. Imagine if this trend continued and entrepreneurs didn't have to worry about marketing and sales anymore, and instead could focus all of their effort on making the best fucking product possible? That sounds pretty cool to me. As an entrepreneur, and as a consumer.
I have a tendency to dream big first, and think about practicalities second. Here, the practical matter is whether it's at all plausible for us to live in this imaginary world. I don't know the answer to that question. My intuition is that it'd be tough, but that it is plausible. I imagine some sort of prediction market where you predict how much people will like different products and services, and companies would have to pay to enter in to this market, but I really don't know.
But I think it's ok to not know. I think it's ok to talk about things that are broken before knowing whether or not they can be fixed.
The problem I have with this is, if you haven't already done a lot of the sales work of finding users and talking to them, how are you going to build a product that anybody wants?
My thinking is that it would be done with more traditional UX user research, a la Rocket Surgery Made Easy.
Here's the deal. If you build what you've described, suddenly you have an entirely new ecosystem in which every other solution out there is suddenly competing.
How do you then win market share within your new market? By advertising, selling, marketing, branding, etc.
In other words, you'd have to do what we do on the internet already in order to get a user base.
No, if the ecosystem existed, you can't win by marketing and stuff. People would always be referring to this Giant Consumer Reports, and the only way to get to the top of the Giant Consumer Reports would be to have a genuinely great product.
I appreciate the concept, but this would never work for one primary reason: it would kill competition. In this ecosystem, Amazon would never be unseated as the primary ecommerce store because there would never be any possibility for a lesser product to gain market share.
That's what's so great about sales and marketing. You don't have to be better than everyone else. And for that I'm glad, because that gives the 99.99% of us some hope!
your headline - this is so true, in a way the products kinda the easy bit, especially if you are in a big old market. you can be the fastest runner in the world but you never turn up to race, know one cares. products the easy bit, to be honest,
Really agreeing with how unnatural accepting "that's the way things work. deal with it" here!
A lot of these lean hypothesis / pull marketing strategies are good for businesses that want to profit, but that forces a lot of problem-solving companies to get more creative with how they build their companies. My biggest thing is that people aren't going to want your product if they don't know it exists, but educating people about their problem may be hard because they might not know their problem exists either. Just because it's harder for them to recognize, does that mean they're not worth fixing?
I think about this a lot, but personal morals point towards "absolutely the hell not"
I feel your sentiment. However, look at it as if this ultimate directory did exist that directs users to your product if it is the right fit for them. How would this platform know if the product is a good fit? It would need to know what that user is looking for, what they like, etc. It would also need to know what features your product has, how they are implemented, is it easy to use, is there good customer support, etc. etc.
AI is very far away from being able to crawl an app and determine the features that exist. So you, as the product owner, would have to fill out forms about what features your product has. You would need to give it a ton of information so it could know what your product is all about. After it knows what your product is about, it would then need to know how to explain that to users so they'd be willing to try it. Just because some platform recommends a product to someone doesn't mean they are going to take that as truth and use that product.
That sounds a lot like marketing. You build a landing page to explain all the features you have. You put the hero's journey spin on marketing copy to tell users what pain your product solves. You then post around on social media to get the word out and do some SEO to get organic traffic. You even mentioned paying to be listed on this platform - that is essentially ads. You can pay for ads today to get people to your site.
As introverted developers it is nice to dream about the problems of marketing going away. It won't though. We have to adapt. It's a huge opportunity for personal growth to go outside the comfort zone and learn how to market a product.
If that's not convincing, you can always try to find a cofounder that enjoys the marketing piece or hire it out to a consultant.
I'm thinking that it would be structured similar to the reviews on The Wire Cutter. They say what they think is the best product for most people, most of the time, and then they get into the caveats of "what if you have these different preferences". My impression is that most of the time there'll be wide agreement on what the best product is, and that it won't differ too much from user to user. But still, this Giant Consumer Reports that I envision would allow you to enter your own preferences/criteria so that the recommendations can be sort of personalized. If it were implemented via the prediction market I was thinking about, that would be very doable.
On that note, if it were implemented as a prediction market, the product owner wouldn't necessarily even have to fill out forms with information such as product features. People would just be making bets on what products they think others will like the most. The output could just be a list of companies ranked by how good their products are (that you can filter based on your own criteria).
But yeah, I think it would be better if that output included more things, like the features your product has. That plus your having to pay to be a part of Giant Consumer Reports definitely has it's similarities to marketing. But with in this imaginary world, I think BIATC would be much more true, because people would trust the ranked list. Whereas in todays world, if we use ads as an example, they aren't nearly as effective. I think the key is the trust people would have in the ranked lists that Giant Consumer Reports produces.
I totally agree that in the world we live in, we do have to address the problems of marketing. I don't mean to imply that we can ignore them. My core points here with this post are 1) I think the world would be better off if BIATC were (more) true, 2a) "that's just the way it is" is a dangerous thought, because then you stop trying to improve it, 2b) it's worth talking about whether or not things are broken before you really know whether or not they can be fixed.