did anyone ask you for this?
Complexity in your product may mean you haven’t started with your minimal viable audience. Derek Sivers has a charmingly rigorous criterion for a Good Business Idea. Your business needs to meet a need for a particular kind of person, ideally a kind of person you know yourself, a kind of person you also ARE yourself. For Sivers in the 90s, this meant building a rudimentary website where indie musicians could sell their CDs. Sivers was an indie musician. At the time, you couldn’t sell a CD at a store unless you had a record deal and possibly also a distribution deal. So once he found a way to sell his own CDs on a website he built, friends started to ask him to host and sell theirs. Straightforward; simple. A great example of a business that came about as a result of ~local demand.
This orientation differs from a market- or competitor-focused one. It can feel smartest to start with the current menu of options and add something to one of those options. You imagine yourself drawing the attention of future customers with your added feature. You offer [all this status quo stuff] AND [your new feature].
That “AND” can get you in trouble. You can use it as a false proxy for “a friend asks me to meet this need for them”. You can assume there is demand for the AND. By definition, the AND probably means your product is more expensive to create than incumbents - you take on the cost of making their thing, then add the cost of bolting on the AND.
It can feel counterintuitive for a builder. But Sivers’ insight is sneaky powerful - sort out first who you are building for. Then decide what you are building for them.
-eric
