Positioning your product

This sign cracks me up every time I pass it on the way home. Reminds me of a few startups. First they try breakfast. But the cook's not that good. Few customers come back a second time. So they add expresso. But the expresso isn't that good either.....by the time they're trying to add balloons to the list the investors bail.

Do one thing. Do it well.

"One thing" usually means providing one solution to a problem for a group of people. Doing it well may mean having a critical mass of features. This is often a challenge in a first rev product. I try to find new product ideas and market segments where the team can solve one problem and do it well enough to make a real difference without taking on an un-doable number of features. The trick is finding a group of users or an application where we can make a difference (= beat the competition) with a subset of the ideal feature list.

In mature markets this is difficult. New markets that have shorter requirement lists are ideal. Sometimes old markets where a new "disruptive" technology can be applied will work too.

Someday I hope to meet Sweet Amy and ask her how it all went down.