🛠️ The Product Person #17: Just Make It Work
Target a job to be done and do that one job well.
You’d be surprised. If your product just “works”, users will be happy.
By “works” I mean, it does the one thing you said it would do well.
🔍 A quick case study
A product I tried out recently that just “worked”:
Let me tell you a short story about the experience:
I have to create a presentation on Pablo Escobar for Spanish class (college, I know right). And I found some good Pablo pics but I just wanted his face and not the background because I have a certain aesthetic I’m going for.
I google “image background remover” and Remove.bg is the first option. In my experience, SEO-optimized job-specific tools like that usually have terrible landing pages.
For example, when I needed a mp4 video converter, online-convert.com is the first option for “mp4 converter”. And its landing page is, frankly, pretty ugly.
I usually expect the best looking products to come from searching on Product Hunt. So I felt it was a big deal when Remove.bg exceeded my aesthetic expectations:
Sleek-looking and approachable. For a hot second, I thought I clicked the wrong link.
So I uploaded the Pablo image I wanted to use and bam! the background just disappeared. Cleanly. Even the curls on his head were intact. Jaw. Dropped.
It just works.
Some other products I know of that do their one specific job well:
Loom - shared screen recording
Coolors - color scheme generator
Screely - automatically makes screenshots prettier with rounded corners, a shadow overlay effect, and color background.
📍The Lesson
Target a job to be done and do that one job well. Fill that hole for yourself or someone else. Of course, it’s better if it starts from you.
You don’t have to promise the world. You don’t have to do too much. Just be so good that when someone thinks “oh, I need to do that thing again”, you’re the first option that comes to mind.
To nail this idea down, take Zoom for example.
COVID-19 created a need for remote, video communication. According to Wikipedia, there are over 30 prominent video communication products out there. But what’s the first product everyone’s thinking about? Zoom (Sorry, Google Hangouts). Because it’s well known to be a very reliable solution to the specific problem it solves.
Some social proof-laced persuasion
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❤️ That’s all for this week’s issue. Thank you so much for being a reader. You’re awesome. You keep me motivated. You don’t know it but you’re changing my life. So a big shout out to you for existing.
🐦 Product tweets: @ProductPersonHQ // My tweets: @antdke
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Have a fantastic rest of your week…
and make sure to wash your hands :)
-Anthony