Building a successful product

“The goal of a startup is to find the sweet-spot where minimum product and viable product meet — get people to fall in love with you. Over time, you listen to your customers, make improvements and raise the bar on what viable means — making it more expensive for competitors to jump in.” – John Radoff

There is a worth to read post about how to develop a product from a beginning. Here are my favorite points:

You don't have to be afraid to start small:

...We heard no outcry from customers who felt shortchanged by our tiny product, because we were selling something that does what it says on the tin; our marketing and sales were aligned with the product itself. We found, however, that those initial customers were delighted as we started to add new features based on their feedback...

Then you should select the new features carefully:

Listen To The People Who Are Willing To Pay For Your Product ... There will be no end of people who are keen to tell you exactly what you should build them for free.

Clearly understanding your core use case — the initial problems your product is intended to solve — is vital to deciding which features to add to the product.

And finally do not expect big increase in sales numbers after developing a new feature:

It took me a long while to learn that adding new features is not a huge marketing win in itself. We’ve added some huge and much-requested features to Perch over the years. Many of those features took as long to build as developing the initial product did. However, launching a new feature has never made a blip in our sales figures.

... pinning your hope of acquiring new customers on some new headline feature is not realistic in my experience. Instead, focus on marketing activities and on finding new customers and users, in addition to developing new features.