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Ingredients Of Good Products

Good products have large return on investment (ROI), right ? Wrong.

Okay, in the business world everything is around profits and money, but don’t get fooled by high profits. The quality of a product or even a service doesn’t rely only on this factor. I always believed and consider it to this day that money is a nice ’side effect’ that your product / service is producing.

So what is the ’secret ingredient’ of making good products ?

The first and most important factor is quality. If you’re making quality products people will recognize that and appreciate it. The second factor is the community formed around your product.

Let’s look at some of the known and good products / services today: iPhone, Macintosh, Basecamp, Textmate, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter.

These products have not one, but these two things in common: quality and community.

Don’t under estimate the power of your community, instead learn how to control this power in a positive way. What a bad marketer does is to see only the immediate effects of a given campaign or any other marketing action and not considering the long-run effects and consequences upon the particular product / service.

” Doesn’t everybody know, in his personal life, that there are all sorts of indulgences delightful at the moment but disastrous in the end? Doesn’t every little boy know that if he eats enough candy he will get sick? Doesn’t the fellow who gets drunk know that he will wake up next morning with a ghastly stomach and a horrible head ? ” (Henry Hazlitt – Economics in one lesson)

Bring culture in your product. At least this is what Apple does. Just look at the iPhone and the long lines in front of Apple stores. Look at Youtube, it’s successful, because it has a huge community and it’s easier to use than similar sites.

Sometimes the power of community is more important than quality. That’s the case with Twitter. How many times was the service down, but the user’s always came back, because they cared.

Make simple products. Who knows Basecamp also knows what I’m talking about. Don’t just add features blindly to your product, because you can and you think it will increase your products value. Always ask before you want to add another feature, is this what my userbase wants ?

Feature rich products are often called feature creep products too, because they go well beyond the products main purpose making the product rather complex and useless. This is the case of mobile phones. What’s the main purpose of these devices ? To talk. What they’re doing now ? Play music, videos, watch photos, set meetings, play games, browse the web, etc. The main purpose became inferior. They’re feature creep ? In my opinion, yes. They simply bring an average quality of every media (video, music, photo). If I want to take photos, I would buy at least a compact camera. If I want to record videos, I would buy a camcorder, etc.

I believe that in order to make a good product or service you must develop and nurture it like if it was your own child. And if you do this, it will reward you.

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