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I always thought it was a mistake to position your business as if your product was a "must have", mainly because it's not.

Treat it as a "nice to have". That will force you to do everything else better.

A lot of people have learned the hard way in the past year that very little is a "must have".

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It's more important as a mental exercise than as absolute advice. Some people put it another way: is your product a vitamin or a painkiller?

For a business to become successful, the product will need to become a must have at some point. If it's not right now, then you need to keep pursuing it until it is.

Vitamin vs painkiller is a better analogue. Consider Facebook, it isn't really a "must have", but seems to be doing just fine

I couldn't disagree more. When you start using Facebook, it becomes a must have. When I went about deleting all my online accounts, it was one of the two I didn't get rid of. If I got rid of that, I'd lose the most valuable communications medium I've got.

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