What making something people want looks like | Hacker News Reader

What making something people want looks like

blog.monitorbook.com

34 pointsmgdo25 comments

I don't think it's a case of "something people want", but FOMO and spammy Twitter tactics.

It sucks in your Twitter friends graph, and whenever you start streaming it posts to Twitter with the |LIVE NOW| announcements. Those two methods at least make sense - but it's the Meerkat chat that's annoying and inexcusable. It's cross posted to Twitter and everything you type is @-replied to yourself (instead of to the people you're replying to), so your Twitter followers are forced to see your Meerkat conversations... and only your half of the conversation. There's no reason those conversations couldn't just stay on Meerkat, and you can't see the rest of the conversation unless you're on Meerkat yourself.

I have never muted anything on Twitter as fast as I've muted everything to do with Meerkat. Even then, I still can't mute those one-sided Meerkat conversations, because there's no hashtag - I'll probably just have to unfollow those users. But at least it's given me a great understanding of how people feel whenever I tweet about Eurovision or soccer.

There are at least 3 types of "something people want". The first is the obvious, you-see-it, you-want-it, you-know everyone-and-his-cousin-will-want-it-too something, like the original iPod. There's the it-doesn't-seem-that-great-until-you-try-it-for-a-while something, like Minecraft. And then there's the I-still-don't-know-why-anyone-wanted-it-even-after-it's-insanely-popular something, like Flappy Bird. What these three types of somethings have in common is what people really want.

> The first is the obvious, you-see-it, you-want-it, you-know everyone-and-his-cousin-will-want-it-too something, like the original iPod

The original iPod sales looked like this [1]. Tell me if you think if it falls into your first category. For the first 3-4 years, very little movement. It is interesting to me that a large number of people feel iPod was a smash hit right out of the gate.

[1] https://geekwhisperin.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/total-ipod...

This is the best evidence I've ever seen, I think, in favor of not worrying about "having a great launch/1.0 product". Even if you're Apple and the whole world is watching you keynote the product on stage, people will still forget the first kinda-sucky versions, and instead remember the first good-enough version, as the first version.

(Mostly because, for the critical mass of users, the first good-enough version is the first version; it's the first version their friends were excited enough to tell them about, so it's the first one they tried.)

Which is all to say: stop worrying about putting people off with a bad launch product. Ship the dang thing, and keep shipping it, and eventually, somewhere in there, the thing you're shipping will get good enough to get people paying attention. It doesn't matter what the early adopters think; they don't get to write history.

Let's pretend iTunes for Windows never launched in late 2003. What would that graph look like then?

iPod didn't have some miraculous transformation over its first three years. It pivoted from being a Mac accessory into a standalone music player that anyone (Mac or PC owner) could use.

Uh, that's a chart of the total cumulative sales, so just by the nature of the chart, it's going to make the early years look terrible. The raw numbers[1] were: 376K in 2002, 937K in 2003, 4.4M in 2004, and 22.5M in 2005. That's growths of roughly 300%, 400%, and 500% after the first year. That says to me while everyone may not have known about it right away (Apple was still the plucky underdog, instead of the $700B overgod), people were pretty quick on the uptake once they really got to see it. Anyway, even if you didn't rush out and buy an iPod for whatever reason, it was pretty obviously a very cool piece of gear that people would want. "Want" doesn't necessarily mean "buy". I want a McLaren P1, and I know a lot of other people do as well, but they will only sell 375 of them, ever. That's why I would put it in my first category along with the iPod.

[1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarte...

Good point!

I had never heard of Meerkat before, but live in SF, and use plenty of apps, and am a developer. The more I see things like these, the more I grow suspicious they're yet another form of "submarine" articles, in pg terms.

First off, didn't it "hit" at SXSW, when all those kids get back to SF, you'll hear about it.

Secondly, you're right - "_everyone's_ using it" - is pretty subjective.

The problem with the statement "make something people want" is that people most often don't know what they want.

Most people didn't want the first iPhone, or even the first car -- they were happy with their non-smart phone, and their buggies. If people did know what they want, there wouldn't be a huge marketing and PR industry to tell them what they want.

The statement can lead to the kind of thinking that only products like Meerkat that have viral growth are worth investing in. Some companies may require a large marketing push to get off the ground. Even Paul Graham's first company was spending $16,000 a month on PR.

I'm not sure you can say that most people didn't want the first iPhone.

Sure, they weren't already picturing "an iPhone" and thinking "I want that"—but there had been Star-Trek-PADD-like-devices in the popular consciousness for ages. People were cognisant of a hole in their lives, that any number of hypothetical things within a previously-empty product category could fill.

Apple's job in marketing the iPhone (and iPad) basically consisted of convincing people that "the future had arrived"—that they had created the first product to meet that known nothing-exists-that-can-meet-it need.

I would say the same of the first internal-combustion-engine automobile. There were carriages, there were trains, and so people could see that in the intersection there was some efficiency to be gained in everyday life if the technology could be created to capture it—though it wasn't really clear what form it would take.

I think this is where wearable/augmented-reality tech is today. People know there's something there, can see the potential of the product category from all the sci-fi movie UXes we've ever been subjected to—but nothing has really been an example of a real product that would sit in the as-yet-hypothetical space. We're still reaching toward the space, rather than landing in it.

I agree. A poster below said it might be better to express this as, "Solve a problem that people have". To which I would add, "...and cultivate the market for your solution". This would eliminate the implication that something should be automatically "wanted" by people for it to be successful.

I think it's time to replace 'Make something people want' with 'Solve a problem that people have'. This works regardless of if people can cogently articulate their problem.

Either way you slice it, a statement with fewer than 10 words probably isn't going to be your recipe to success.

If that's what people want then they already have it with Ustream, Livestream, Bambuser, Qik, etc, etc.

I think Meerkat is riding some kind of SXSW hype machine but I don't see it lasting. Look up Justin.tv.

you haven't tried meerkat.

it's onboarding is akin to WhatsApp. but, instead of using the phone number, Meerkat sits on top of Twitter.

it is also running both ends on the iPhone/iPad. you can broadcast from your iPhone, using Tweets as live, inline comments in the video.

it was awesome to join a Meerkat from the Apple Keynote recently, various users were live streaming from the floor.

saying it is just like Justin.tv is the classic IT answer that predicts big success of the new entry. see http://xkcd.com/1497/

Meerkat has two things going for it:

1) It spammed twitter whenever you used it.

Start-up journalists use Twitter constantly. People who hype themselves use Twitter constantly. This is the live streaming target market. Additionally, Twitter is real-time, like live streaming, and Twitter doesn't actively manage your stream, so the spam wouldn't get hidden (Facebook had this happen to them years ago, and they've since gotten way better at keeping app spam out of your face). Twitter was the perfect existing social network to use here.

2) Twitter noticed this and shut them down quickly.

While this sounds like a bad thing, it ended up being perfect for Meerkat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect in action. On top of the natural Streisand effects, there quickly arose a conspiracy around it -- Twitter had recently acquired Periscope, a company competing with Meerkat! And on top of even that, this all happened right as start-up journalists converged on Austin for SXSW, so they could chat about it, use it to live stream bands, etc.

On top of these two main factors, Meerkat does have a slightly better onboarding process, and a cute brand.

What about Justin.tv? Are you saying Twitch is a failure?

Insulting to cite 2048 as "making something people want", considering it's an inferior copy of threes.

Yah but Threes did not go viral as 2048 did

I bought Threes, but I prefer 2048. I am terrible at sliding puzzles and strategy games, so Threes is too hard for me.

Edit: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

I'm really not sure what they mean by "track something on the web".

Do they mean "monitor price changes for something you might want to buy sometime with push alerts when the price changes"?

Their screen shot is a picture of an Amazon page.

I can't think of anything I'd want to track that I simply wouldn't follow their twitter feed or like them on facebook.

And if I was really that price sensitive, I am not sure I'd track an item on Amazon waiting for a discounted price to show up.

I'm confused.

How "easy" is it to create a service like meerkat?

What are the minimum requirements regarding hardware setup, cost overhead, web app setup?

It appears the images in the blog have been hugged to death. Getting Access Denied messages is what it looks like.

It is working fine for me

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