VALUE IS NOT ONLY ABOUT SOLVING PROBLEM

Lessons learned from shutting down a dream project

Five years ago I started a business and stopped working on it.

It was called JettMe and It was not growing. Not even a tiny bit.

The failure made me reflect on many things. I had invested all my savings in this project and was promoting it like crazy.

Not to mention thousands of dollars in expenditure on ads and agencies.

I learned many things on the journey to build this venture.

But JettMe did not stand on its feet, whatsoever.

Many new beginnings sprout from the remains of this unfulfilled dream.

OkTheFun is one of them. But when I gave myself a fresh start, I did it with one and only one thing in mind.

Value.

We often tend to think that value is only about solving a problem in people\’s lives.

It is a huge mistake to think so because adding value means much more than just solving a problem.

Let’s take a look:

Growth

Is there a scope for growth in your product?

By this, I don’t mean the market size, but the qualitative growth of the product and the consumer.

My product was a news aggregation service which displayed news from top creative industry sources.

Nothing wrong with that, but it was static.

Readers were not able to curate the stories, nor did they have any say in which sources should be added to the list.

Looks like an ego ride — “I have made something and you will have to use it.”

But the real growth comes from interactions.

When the audience has active participation in the product.

I might not vouch for the traditional product where everything is built for everyone, but in the modern product design landscape (especially digital) you have to consider user participation.

They add their bit to the product and you facilitate a space for this to happen.

The real seed of growth lies here.

Simplicity

If you can’t mention what it is in one line, scrap it. I am serious.

Simplicity is the currency of healthy exchange.

Cluttering your project with too many products and features will confuse the audience.

I wasn’t sure if my website was about news aggregation, affiliate marketing or a blog itself.

This is the prime reason why the project is doomed.

Now I have shifted to simpler things.

Be where people are, stick to one message at a time, and present one feature at a time.

You have multiple dimensions to your personality, but you have to choose one that you want to reveal and lead the conversation in the marketplace with that.

I spend most of the day meditating and reading scripture, but I don’t clutter this space with those thoughts.

It is unreasonable. It distracts and deprives your audience of the prime value proposition.

Speed

“Money loves speed”

You have heard it many times.

But, it not only matters in the decision-making process, it also matters how efficiently you deliver your product.

To deliver the product with speed, it has to be understood quickly.

A product which fails to convey what it is about fails to deliver with speed.

If you open any successful website, you will instantly get an idea of what the website is about.

Mobile phone, Blogging platform etc,

That wasn’t the case with JettMe. It featured everything everywhere on the front page.

It conveyed so many messages that the time required to process all of them was long.

Business model

No, I am not going to brag about fine-tuning your approach and blah blah start-up jargon.

Ask this simple question to yourself instead, Does your business nurture a relationship?

Within the community or with the leader of the tribe.

A business has to nurture relationships by connecting people to people, not people to a source of code.

This was the biggest mistake that I have made while building the failed platform.

Although the readers could collect stories they like from the aggregation, they were not able to communicate with me or any other member of the site.

This can be the biggest flaw of any business.

The business model should allow to optimise the conversation around the product.

It creates advocates and promoters within the community.

Going big

Many business and marketing professionals think that going big is about reaching the masses.

It can be a lucrative endeavour to get millions of eyes on your product but it means nothing without this missing piece of puzzle.

A product should be capable of making a meaningful impact.

It can be a few thousand people, but your product should be capable of making a meaningful impact on their lives.

It should continue to do so incrementally.

Going big is not about going in front of millions of people with a product that is made for everyone and everybody.

In fact, going big is all about making a bigger impact on a select group of people.

Your tribe, your creed.

It will increase the quality of not only your life but also the lives of the people you come in contact with your product.

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JettMe was supported by the Amazon Web Services Startup Program, I will keep it live until it is hosted for free there, as a reference to this blog — JettMe (I have discontinued working on the site)

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