There is some really good advice here. Honestly, I think this might be one of the most important takeaways you can have as a startup founder/CEO in general:
> It's exciting when you notice users "misusing" your product to do something you hadn't intended. This means there's something they want so desperately that they'll not only use any solution you offer, but even use things that aren't meant to be solutions. When you see something like that, don't be annoyed that your users are using your product wrong; listen for the message they're sending, because it could be valuable.
A lot of very specialist businesses seem to fail this test, and lose out on the potential for a huge market because of it. Like it sounds ridiculous as hell, but I remember when GoAnimate had a huge audience among kids and teens looking to make silly videos for sites like YouTube. I also remember the company feeling uncomfortable that they were getting known for that online, and trying to refocus their product/service towards business users instead.
Maybe they should have not done that, and realised that the periphery demographic was a potential customerbase that could have used a slightly different, perhaps more focused product with features relevant to their usecases.
Similarly, I remember an example of a business creating software meant for designing signs for road and metro systems being surprised that toy train and simulation game enthusiasts were using the software for other uses. Again, feels like they should have treated this as a business opportunity, not a cause for confusion or concern.
> Squeezing every last penny out of customers is a distraction. It gets you 2x returns at most. Whereas discovering some new thing you could make for them could easily get you 10x or 100x returns. They're two different ways of looking at the world, and the O'Reilly way makes more, for those who can do it. [5]
This feels like a perfect condemnation of how a lot of private equity firms manage businesses. These sorts of tactics make them money sure, but a lot of the businesses they buy up would probably do better if they held off on the whole 'squeeze resources to breaking point' philosophy in favour of a much more customer focused one.
I think the interesting failure mode is when a company sees unexpected users as a branding problem instead of a product signal
I miss the pre-https-by-default days where I could see what search terms people used to land on my blog. Gave excellent topic ideas for unmet needs.
That's not about HTTPS, unless you were intercepting their traffic to Google. That's about referer, and Google blocking referer because it gave away a competitive advantage.
Yeah, that was an oddly useful little feedback loop. You'd see some bizarrely specific query bringing people in and realize there was an entire question people were asking that you'd never thought to write about.
Google Search Console can give you those.
I miss the pre-https-by-default days where I could see what search terms people used to land on my blog. Have excellent topic ideas for unmet needs.
>A lot of very specialist businesses seem to fail this test, and lose out on the potential for a huge market because of it. Like it sounds ridiculous as hell, but I remember when GoAnimate had a huge audience among kids and teens looking to make silly videos for sites like YouTube. I also remember the company feeling uncomfortable that they were getting known for that online, and trying to refocus their product/service towards business users instead.
I was testing ISP billing software a decade ago, and there was a product we had already committed to buy and it was 99% feature complete, there was just 1 little thing it wouldnt do. And they refused to implement it. Not only that but they told us "Actually we have been acquired and we aren't allowed to implement any new features anyway."
Anyway we went with our second choice, who are now very famous in the space, but at the time were still getting a foothold. And they were only 75% feature complete. But they brought themselves up to 100% over 3 sprints. Other than them using an old version of a single package, they never gave us any grief. They know that their customer needs are what they build software for.