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Comment by qzw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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!

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