Imagine that you decide to create your own product: an app that helps people manage their finances, a small coffee shop, a new fitness device or an online service. You have a clear vision of what the final product should look like. You imagine people using it, enjoying it and eventually paying for it. You invest your time, money and effort into turning the idea into reality.

After months of work, you finally create your device or application or even open a business. But when it comes to selling it, you discover that people do not really need what you have created. They are not ready to use it and certainly not ready to pay for it. So, what went wrong?

Components of a Successful Product

The success of any product depends on several components. The most important one is value. Consumers are willing to use your product if they see that it solves their problem and improves their quality of life.

Value is the primary and determining factor in the success of your product. If you are trying to solve a problem that does not actually exist, your product will simply be unnecessary. Another problem can be a very narrow target audience that generates too little revenue to cover the costs of creating the product.

The second component is usability: will users actually be able to use your product? If you solve an important problem, but the design of your product creates significant barriers to using it, people will not want to spend their time on it and will find an easier way to satisfy their needs.

The third component is the feasibility of your idea. Your way of solving consumers’ problems has to be realistic and achievable. There are situations where a team starts developing a product and discovers that the original scope is unrealistic. In this case, they have to either reduce the scope of the product or lower their expectations for the final result.

The last important component is viability. This covers a wide range of requirements for your product: can it be successfully monetized? Does the unit economics work? Does the product fit your existing business model? Does it violate agreements with partners or damage your brand? And, finally, can you actually launch this product in your target market?

Besides these components, there are, of course, many other questions that need to be addressed.

One of them is timing. Your idea can be ahead of its time, or you can be too late. The market may already be crowded, entry barriers may be too high, or the market itself may already be disappearing. There is also the competitive environment. You have to create a product that is good enough for users to abandon what they are already using and switch to your solution.

Creating a product is a creative process and you will have to overcome many obstacles to succeed.

The Discovery Process

What conclusion can we draw from these points?

Remember the importance of the Discovery Process. Study your customers, understand their pain points and needs, learn how they currently solve their problems, understand their consumer habits and find out what kind of solution they are actually willing to pay for.

The more you know about your customers and the more complete a picture of your user you can build, the more likely you are to be on the right track.

Set hypotheses and test them. Create a landing page, conduct interviews, perform a unit economics analysis. There are many different techniques for setting and testing hypotheses – use them to reduce uncertainty and improve the quality of the final result.

If you know that your MVP is gaining traction, you can move on to developing the full product with greater confidence. At the same time, your first users will become an invaluable source of information for further improvements and iterations.

What Failure Looks Like

Value – Juicero

The startup Juicero developed a juicing machine aimed at busy, health-conscious people with high incomes.

Conceptually, the planned value was high. The target audience existed and was willing to pay. The company offered a solution for getting fresh juice without cleaning or dealing with unnecessary hassle: insert a juice pack and get a fresh product.

However, users eventually discovered that the machine was practically unnecessary because the juice packs could simply be squeezed by hand. At the same time, the machine itself was extremely expensive.

The product therefore failed to provide enough additional value and became a symbol of a failed startup idea.

Usability – Apple Butterfly Keyboard

Apple’s Butterfly Keyboard became one of the most controversial hardware decisions in the company’s history.

In an attempt to create an extremely thin and lightweight laptop, Apple redesigned the keyboard for its ultra-thin MacBook line. Problems started almost immediately after the laptops reached real users.

If a small crumb or piece of dust got under a traditional keyboard key, it usually just stayed there without affecting the keyboard. With the Butterfly mechanism, even a tiny particle could interfere with the movement of a key. Because the keyboard was integrated into the upper case of the laptop, replacing it was also very expensive.

Eventually, Apple completely removed the Butterfly Keyboard from its current MacBook lineup.

Feasibility – Cyberpunk 2077

CD Projekt RED officially announced Cyberpunk 2077 in May 2012. In its promotional materials, the game was presented as a massive and graphically revolutionary project. The developers promised a living open world, impressive artificial intelligence and a polished experience across different platforms.

However, when the game was released, its technical condition was described as notoriously broken and disastrous. The situation became so serious that Sony even removed the game from the PlayStation Store.

Later, CD Projekt RED stated that releasing the game in such a poor condition, especially on older hardware, was a major mistake.

The problem was not only technical bugs. The original scope and expectations for the game turned out to be too ambitious compared with what the team could realistically build and polish by the release date. The studio failed to recognize this problem in time, which caused significant reputational damage.

Viability – MoviePass

MoviePass is an excellent example of an unviable business model.

The service offered a revolutionary subscription: for only $9.95 per month, users could go to a movie theater and watch a movie almost every day.

However, the company did not have sufficient agreements with movie theaters and had to pay the full ticket price for its users.

If a user went to the cinema just once a month, the company was already losing money. The more popular the product became, the faster the company burned through investors’ money and moved towards bankruptcy.

MoviePass tried to save itself by introducing restrictions – limiting users to three movies, excluding some blockbusters and changing other conditions. This only frustrated users and made the situation worse.

The service eventually shut down and left behind a remarkable example of negative unit economics and an unviable business model.

Conclusion

It often seems obvious: how could you possibly forget to find out what your customers actually need?

But in practice, companies often neglect user research or base product development on assumptions and their own idea of a perfect product.

Therefore, if you understand the importance of Discovery methodologies, you are more likely to achieve success, avoid common mistakes and reduce unnecessary costs.

In the end, creating a good product does not start with building it. It starts with understanding why people need it in the first place.

Originally published on my Substack: https://pld123.substack.com/p/why-products-fail