Great but Painful: The Origin of Every Successful Product?
Don't let people do new things. Make existing behaviors less painful.
If you want to build a product that people will use, find something that people already do and make it less painful.
People are notoriously bad at knowing what they want. If you ask someone what they want then they will typically tell you what they think a socially virtuous person is expected to want. They will tell you that they want to eat healthier, understand people with different political opinions, know whether news stories are reliable, make more friends, be a better parent, and serve their community.
Silicon Valley is littered with the graves of products that tried to solve problems users said they wanted to solve. These products typically got enthusiastic responses when shown to users, and the developers were surprised to see them get little usage after they were launched.
In practice, the biggest sign that a user will use a product is that they already do the thing the product lets them do, and gain a clear benefit from doing so, but the current way they do it is painful.
Pretty much all successful consumer tech products succeeded by following this formula.
Original Facebook: Harvard students are looking at directories of people’s faces and names. This is great because they can find out the name of someone they met (particularly a member of the opposite sex). This is painful because you have to walk to the physical facebook to do it.
Facebook wall: Students are writing and reading messages or each other’s walls. This is great because they can see what others are up to and know when they might want to talk to someone. This is painful because you have to go to their dorm room and read the whiteboard outside their door.
Facebook news feed: Facebook users are periodically browsing through the most recent wall updates shared by all their friends. This is great because it lets them know what all their friends are up to and identify opportunities to socialize. This is painful because they have to manually click on each of their friends.
Original Twitter: Influential people are broadcasting messages to large numbers of followers. This is great because it allows a large group of people to know what is going on using their mobile phones, particularly during protests and events. This is painful because you have to set up broadcast SMS, or have a phone-tree where people manually forward messages.
Original WhatsApp: People with overseas relatives are using text messages to communicate with their families. This is great because they can stay in touch with family members, including people who have old feature phones, or limited internet. This is painful because cell phone providers charge lots of money for messages.
Original SnapChat: Teenagers are communicating with their friends by sending them selfies (some of them sexual). This is great because it gives a sense of being “present” with that person, and is less effort than typing a message. This is painful because sometimes people hold onto those selfies and later use them to mock that person after they have fallen out.
Uber: City dwellers are using their phones to arrange for a car to pick them up and drive them somewhere. This is great because it lets them get around a city without having to own or park a car. It is painful because they have to talk to a human to explain where they are, and it’s hard to know whether a car will come soon enough for booking it to be worth it.
DoorDash: Busy professionals and working parents are ordering food delivery from restaurants. This is great because they can get food without the hassle of having to go to a restaurant. This is painful because only a few restaurants (e.g. Pizza) get enough delivery demand to provide delivery services.
Craigslist: People are using email mailing lists to advertise used products they want to sell. This is great because it allows buyers to make money for unwanted items and buyers to get things for cheap. This is painful because the email becomes hard to read when lots of things are being given away, and you can’t tell whether a product has already been taken.
AirBnb: Attendees of large events are coordinating to find people whose houses they can crash at. This is great because it allows people to find a place to stay even when all hotels are booked up. This is painful because it is hard for hosts or guests to know if they can trust each other.
Original Amazon: People are getting niche books delivered to them from large bookstores outside of their town. This is great because you can get books that aren’t available in your local bookstore. This is painful because you often have to call multiple book stores to find one that has the book you want.
Slack: Employees at a company are communicating by sending live messages to multiple shared channels. This is great because you can see what is going on live and enter and leave channels based on what you are doing. This is painful because it is typically done using IRC, which is hard to set up and locks modern chat features.
Substack: Industry experts are sharing information with followers using paid email newsletters. This is great because it allows subscribers to get high quality niche information that social media wouldn’t distribute, and allows authors to make enough money to keep doing it. This is painful because you have to cobble together existing services to make it work.
Each of these follows the same pattern of “[People type] are doing [action]. This is great because [benefit]. This is painful because [cost].”.
Can you think of any successful consumer tech products or successful feature launches that didn’t follow this formula? My guess is that there aren’t any.
Note. I don’t claim originality for this idea. It’s what I saw a lot of people do at Facebook, Quora, and Google while I was there, and it’s similar to various problem-definition frameworks that are commonly used. However I don’t think I’ve seen it presented in exactly this way before, and I personally find this formulation useful.
A big part of the pain reduction is reducing transaction costs. Those are the costs involved with finding, negotiating and enforcing any agreement. The personal costs of time and risk beyond what you paid directly for the service. The greatest gain is when the transaction cost is high relative to the direct costs. For example, car sharing where you expected a stranger to get their own temporary insurance has effectively infinite transaction costs. Car share services changed the California legislation to allow it and created a new industry in the process. From online travel to ebay to photo sharing, a large part of what Silicon Valley has done for decades is reduce transaction costs. Perhaps two different ways to describe the same thing.