You don't get to say what people like about something unless you let it out into the world. There are so many cases where people built and released something just to find out people love it for the reasons they never expected. This guy makes it sound like he knows why he failed but it's far from it. The biggest reason they failed was because they never released anything. The first thing you learn as soon as you release a product into real world is that people say one thing but do another--so many people say they love something but they never use it. Only way to get around is to release it in public and find the early adopters who WILL actually use it (instead of just saying they like it).
>> The first thing you learn as soon as you release a product into real world is that people say one thing but do another--so many people say they love something but they never use it. >> @galostoca above
That right there, is the whole truth. Not only do they not use it, they don't buy it to begin with. What sells and what people like are not the same as what they need or think they need.
Case in point. I developed a process, software and hardware, to take an ordinary photo and turn it into a 3D carving in the early 2000s. There were CNC programs that could do it with a lot of human touch-up, mesh manipulation, and machine coding, but mine went pretty seamlessly from photo to 'send it to the machine'.
Everybody, everybody is not just family and friends, loved it when they saw the photo and sample maple hardwood output side-by-side. People made statements like, 'I would pay an arm and a leg to have a door carved for my house'.
I brought the carvings to wooden boat shows with my and my partner's handmade seagoing kayaks, and people flocked around our table/booth. 'Can I get this on the kayak too?' Not one sale! The only money ever made by it was doing carvings on wooden urns for a local animal or pet cemetery. In similar fashion, I had an offer from a company that did bronze bas relief plaques for tombstones for a one-time purchase of my software! Needless to say, this didn't help with my emotional state, Stephen King references aside.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Yeah for the first couple of times I was heartbroken (It still happens), but now I've learned to embrace it. Nowadays when I have an idea, instead of asking the same dumb question to people "Would you use this?", I try to build an MVP as quickly as possible and let the product do the asking, and users answer with action instead of words.
Like Steve Jobs said, people don't know what they want. This is not a condescending comment, it's a great insight that comes from being able to understand how human mind works.
