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Building opinionated products
Focusing on your vision, applying your values, and knowing who you’re building for.
Everybody loves a person who is so stubborn in their beliefs that they won’t cave to anyone who disagrees.
Okay maybe that’s not a universally true statement. But join me anyway as we apply it to SaaS products.
Many startups (and especially grown up companies) both fail to start with and struggle to retain focus on what they’re aiming to build. It’s just so easy to chase shiny objects, to get worn down by complaints, to greedily target expansion into new verticals before your existing vertical is happy, to yearn for new users who just might almost maybe care about what you have to offer (especially if the leadership holding the purse strings forces them to use it… cha-ching?).
The issue at hand here is quite simply that you can’t build for everyone. Or perhaps more accurately, you can’t build a product that people want to use if you’re not targeting a specific type of person with a specific set of needs.
The short and sweet answer: have opinions, and build an opinionated product with those opinions in mind. Because when you don’t build with opinions, you’re left to build with the opinions of all your existing and infinitely potential users — at the same time.
Let’s dig into just how painful it can be to build for everyone, and after that, let’s walk up the 4 steps on the staircase to building an opinionated product.
The downsides of building for everyone
Some, even many, of the people within “everyone” will have good thoughts on what you should be building. (Of course, don’t follow their exact words too closely.)
The problem with this is that those people won’t all agree. They’ll come from different backgrounds, have different perspectives, believe different problems are the problems that need solving, consider different solutions as being right vs. wrong or helpful vs. useful or delightful vs. frustrating.
In short: different people want different things, and thus it’s not possible to build a good experience for absolutely everyone.
