Make Something People Want. But How?

Oct 5, 2021 . 4 min read . 279 views

MAKE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT!!!

This is the one piece of advice Y Combinator has been giving its founders for eternity.

“Nothing else you do will matter if you’re not making something people want. You can be the best spokesperson, the best fundraiser, the best programmer, but if you aren’t building a product that satisfies a real need, you’ll never succeed. […]

~Jessica Livingston

However, most founders start with YC’s second most common startup advice.

Write Code and Talk to Users

These are the two most important things to do at a startup but only when you know you are making something people want.

Till then focus your efforts on understanding what people want. No matter how boring that might sound.

The best way to know more about what people want is to talk to them and observe them while they go through their routine life.

Most big startups don’t solve new problems. They solve old problems in new ways.

A step-by-step guide to making something people want

1. Identify a job that you think can be improved. e.g: Browsing
2. Identify a specific persona for whom you want to improve the experience. e.g: Folks who use browsers for work.
3. Build the initial problem hypothesis. e.g: We want to improve the browsing experience for people who use browsers to do their work.
4. Find 5 people who fit your persona. Pay these people for their time if required.
5. Interview these people and try to understand more about their workflow. e.g: When do you use a browser? Why do you use it? What are the most visited websites? What is your biggest frustration? etc.
6. Go deeper into questioning with why’s. e.g: Why do you use Chrome vs Safari? Why do you use Google Calendar vs Apple Calendar?
7. Go even deeper with hows. e.g: How do you manage your tabs right now? How do you navigate your browser experience now? Can you take me through some of your most common workflows?
8. Analyse the results from the 5 interviews. See if you can find some overarching similarities. Ideally, you want 3/5 of people to be facing similar problems.
9. At this point, If you have lesser than 3 people with similar problems start again. Try a different job or a different persona or both. If you are lucky and have a problem more than 3 people are talking about go to the next step.
10. Make user story maps and job maps based on your interviews. Identify the most important user stories (most frequent, most expensive).
11. Build a solution hypothesis using the 90/10 rule. Build something that takes 10% of the effort and solves 90% of the problem.
12. Next talk to the users you interviewed earlier and get their feedback on your solution. More questions here.
    • Do they like what you’ve made so far? If not, why not?
    • Try observing them while they use the product. usability testing.
13. Improve the product based on user feedback.
14. Next, give the initial users some invites for them to invite their friends.
15. Now, talk to 5 new users and ask them if they have the specific problem your MVP solves. e.g: Do you want a browser that natively lets you create workspaces?
16. Get feedback, Give Invites and Repeat.
17. If all is going well till now, the time has come to start focusing on growth.
18. Pick one metric. In most cases it is revenue. Focus on the MOM growth for the chosen metric. Good startups grow at 10% MOM.