The Only Product Worth Building Is One That Can Sell Itself

Building your own product is probably the most creatively satisfying experience you can ever get. Once you start you really don’t care if it takes weeks, months or even years to perfect it. You pour your heart and soul into making it the best it can be, not too mention money and a lot of time. Money can always be made back, but time does not give you a second chance.

How do you make sure you build something which will require minimal marketing investment while giving you more room to innovate with your time? Simple, as the title suggests, build something that will sell itself.

Choices

photo credit: javYliz

If you were to choose, what you would go with?

• Making your product better, or
• Marketing

I would choose the first one and let my customers do the marketing for me. There is nothing that can stop the good ‘ol word of mouth marketing, but there is always a competitors flashier billboard that can take over your market before it’s had a chance to take off. Even though your product may be better.Many people worry about the launch of their product, possibly tied to the lure of quick riches and success, than how good their actual product is. A recent example is Windows Vista, even for all its eye candy it just didn’t live up to what people were expecting. Even to those that like “eye candy”. The length of time they took to come out with a new OS just backfired on them and people could not let go off Windows XP, so much so that Microsoft decided to support it till 2014!

As I’ve learned recently, adding features to something you are developing is a never ending process. There is always that something extra that you want to add. Naturally the more you add, the more time it takes to develop and test.

There has to be a fine line between knowing when to stop innovating and just release your product. While making your product the best it can be is what you should aim for, releasing it with an encyclopedic manual is not.

Simplicity Sells Faster

People like the simple things in life. It is the same for the products they use.

The majority of people can’t be bothered with reading a manual, I know I never did. We like to use our intuition everywhere. If a product cannot be used right out the box then you, as the designer, have done something wrong.

Time and again history has shown us that the difference between the number one and number two product is simplicity.

People don’t like to think, they like to use - and they want to do so quickly. Adding features is one thing, refining the features you already have is something completely different. The more time you spend in refining your product the better it will be received.

As a general rule I don’t like to use anything that takes more than a couple of steps to fix up, hook up or install. If a product does offer more options for customization they should not get in the way of the general method of using it. If I want to complicate my life, let me take the decision. Don’t take it for me and provide me everything right away. Let me look for it, let me want it.

photo credit: Made Underground

In Built Marketing

“Hey did you see that new mp3 player, yeah it’s got this sweet little feature. All you do is press a button.”

If your product can infuse similar behaviour from a customer than you have just succeeded in blending the marketing into your product. Now all you need to do is work on making your product better, refining its features and perhaps make a viral video or two?

In built marketing can be hard for most people to do as they think it is a job for the “marketing department”. Who need a very large budget. I’m not discounting the effect of natural advertising because if it is done right, it can be timeless. Sadly, those moments do not come by often.

So how exactly do you do inbuilt marketing? It’s quite simple, make the product effective at what it’s supposed to do. If there is someone who already has a similar product and you want to compete, make sure yours does it in lesser steps or more efficiently.

As I continue to design and develop products, mostly digital, I can’t stress enough how important it is to make your products simple and easy to use. We spent over 6 months developing WP Auctions {we’ve hardly scratched the surface of it’s potential}, and I’ve spent the last couple of months developing another product which I hope will change the face of how WordPress themes are made.

Recommended Reading

• DealDotCom - Deals On Internet Marketing
• Don’t Beat The Competition, Be Competed Against!
• Idea Building: Watch Your Idea Come To Life
• Case Study: Launching A Web Product - Hiccups