Building products — Matrix, John Wick style
After this, there is no turning back. You don’t read this — the same story continues. You keep spending marketing dollars, building features upon features, and believing you’ll have a billion users one day. You read this — you stay in customer land. I show you the most organic way to build unique products. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.
Free your mind — Question your assumptions
Products are based on assumptions. If you are building an app that reminds the user to drink a glass of water every hour, the assumption is that people need constant reminders to hydrate. If you are building a platform to record all personal expenses, the assumption is that people need to record their daily expenses.
You don’t know for sure that these assumptions are true.
You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind.
— Morpheus, The Matrix
Assumptions are a hit or miss. More of a miss if assumptions are based on an opinion, belief, intuition, analogy, best practise, or half-baked market research. For smart assumptions, we need to first let go of all this fluff until we are left with something that’s nothing but a hard-core true fact, a first principle. Something that’s irrefutably true. Something as fundamental as people want to be rich, parents love their children, exercise is good for health. Something that everyone will agree to. In fact, they will give you a hell yeah!
Even if you are way past the initial stages of product building, it’s worth revisiting the assumptions on which the product was built. After all, it is crucial to uncover the bare minimum truth about your problem space.
Question your assumptions until you find something that’s a hell yeah!
I don’t have a blue pill to offer you to uncover the truth. However, the following exercise will work just fine.
Answer the following questions for your product.
What are you building?
e.g., I’m building an app to help people organise all their photos.
Why are you building this product?
e.g., I’m building a photos app because people need one place to save all their photos.
Let’s call this reasoning Why1.
How sure are you that Why1 is true? If you ask anyone in the world — a stranger walking past or someone who’s not in your field of work — will they agree with you? If yes, you are good to go. If not, get one level deeper and keep questioning your whys all the way from Why1, Why2…Why5. In the example above, we don’t know for sure if everyone wants to save photos in one place. There might be people who want to store their photos at different locations. We keep questioning.
Why do people need one place to save photos?
People fear losing photos that are scattered all over different platforms and devices. (Why2)
Why fear losing photos?
Photos are important for people. (Why3)
Why are photos important for people?
People treasure memories of happy moments spent with their loved ones. (Why4)
Why do people treasure memories with loved ones?
People need to love and be loved. Love drives social connection and reproduction, essential for the survival of our species. (Why5)
Theoretically, it takes many levels of whys to reach the ultimate bare minimum truth. Experts swear on 5 whys. How deep you want to go down the rabbit hole is up to you but practically, going three to four levels is enough. We neither want a pure assumption (Why1, Why2, Why3 above) nor a philosophical depth (Why5 above). In the photos app example, Why4 (People treasure memories of happy moments spent with their loved ones) is just right.
How does this affect your product?
Our viewpoints and yardsticks determine how we perceive a situation. [1]
Your hell yeah is how you perceive the problem space. This is from where you start building up.
It’s the first block you lay down while building a lego structure. Just like two kids can build entirely different things using the same blocks, your unique perspective will enable you to build something unique.
Imagine you want to build a business around bed and breakfast. If your perspective is ‘People are looking for budget hotels’, you can end up with OYO, one of the largest and fastest growing hotel chains. Instead, if you go with ‘People are looking for unique experiences’, you can end up with airbnb.
If you are planning to build a photos app and your perspective is ‘Millennials love sharing everyday experiences’, you will end up building an app that specialises in clicking and sharing perfect selfies with smooth filters. Instead, if you go with ‘Parents cherish pictures of their children growing up’, your focus will be on creating a smart search and organisation of pictures based on date, face identification, etc. like google photos.
Parabellum — Prepare for war / high expectations
Have you seen BloodRayne, Alone in the Dark, Battlefield Earth, House of the Dead? All these are worst rated movies on imdb. These are supposedly action movies but with mixed elements of sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, or horror— little bit of everything for everyone.
On the contrary, John Wick movies aren’t made to accommodate audience from all genres. Instead, they are targeted at people who crave for nail-biting, pure action thrillers.
“Si vis pacem, parabellum”, as told by Winston to John Wick in Chapter 3 Parabellum.
It is Latin for “If you want peace, prepare for war.”
The lesson is evident. Little bit of everything to please everyone? That never works. Not in movies. Not in digital products.
Although it’s tempting to think that everyone is a potential customer, it’s crucial to build your product for the high-expectation customer, HXC for short. These are the people who will get the most out of your product. These people are already on the lookout for the best solution. They don’t need any extrinsic rewards to lure them into trying your product. [2]
Instead of making your product work for everyone, focus on delighting the HXC. When others see them making smart choices and reaping the benefits, they aspire to emulate them. “If it works for her, it will work for me.” Delight the HXC to excite everyone else.
If you want scale, build for high expectations.
Identify and define the HXC before you start building the product. It will help everyone in the team to conceptualise, design, develop, market, and sell the product keeping the same customer in mind. The HXC profile will develop more as you go but it’s important to have one profile to start with.
He’s the One — Nail your biggest benefit
After profiling your HXC, identify the biggest benefit they will receive from your product.
Your biggest benefit must help customer progress at a rate like never before, reaching max potential and then some.
Prioritise building upon and refining your biggest benefit. Play Morpheus and treat your biggest benefit like the One. You would still need Trinity’s agility and Tank’s support (secondary benefits your product provides), but ultimately it will be Neo (your biggest benefit) saving the day.
Imagine you are creating an app for workout. Instead of diluting your time and resources into covering all kinds of strength and cardio training, yoga, pilates, etc., uncover your biggest benefit. What can help your customer become her fittest self yet? Focus on building the best customised program keeping in mind her current fitness level plus an ambitious but achievable target.
If you think progress isn’t applicable for your product, rethink. Your product might not be as simple as the fitness app example above. Things can get complex but progress is always applicable. If you are struggling, try jumping one level higher. [3]
- If you are building a dating app, how can you help your user make progress? Not just by providing more matches but by helping your user become more interesting by taking up new interests, skills, challenges, etc.
- If you are providing a weekly subscription of a fresh roast, you can help your customer, a coffee enthusiast turn into a coffee lover, a coffee lover into a coffee geek, and a coffee geek into a coffee connoisseur.
Your biggest benefit will be your key differentiator in the market. How you make customers better is how you stand out from the competition. [4]
Businesses and startups often struggle to explain what sets them apart from their competition. Failing to find something unique, they end up positioning themselves vaguely such as world’s greatest bank, caring for you, always with you, and so on.
Compare that with ‘book unique places to stay and things to do (airbnb)’, ‘work better, safer, together (Dropbox), ‘live more, bank less (DBS), ‘fastest email experience ever made (Superhuman)’.
Powerful positioning comes from uncovering the biggest benefit to the customer.
Here’s a recap:
- Question your assumptions to uncover your hell yeah. It’s the foundation to building your product. It is also your unique perspective that will enable you to build something unique.
- Prepare for high expectations. Identify and profile your high-expectation customer (HXC). Everyone in the team must be thinking of the same HXC for making all crucial product decisions.
- Nail your biggest benefit. It must help customer progress at a rate like never before, reaching max potential plus plus. The biggest benefit of a product also becomes its key differentiator in the market.
For building tech products where things start with developers crunching code, these steps feel like a lot of pre-work. It is. It is worth the effort though.
I didn’t say it would be easy, Neo. I just said it would be the truth.
— Morpheus, The Matrix
Credits
- ‘Our viewpoints and yardsticks determine how we perceive a situation.’ This thought seeds from reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by the wise and most inspirational author of our times, Yuval Noah Harari.
- The originator of the concept of the high-expectation customer (HXC) is Julie Supan, the branding expert in Silicon Valley and the mind behind the positioning and core branding of Airbnb, Dropbox, Thumbtack, YouTube, etc.
- The idea of jumping one level higher to find the context comes from Badass — Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra.
- Defining USP based on user awesomeness as against product awesomeness comes from Badass — Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra.
