
Deeper or wider - peter123
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/deeper-or-wider.html
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10ren
He's talking about a very special case were a group of people need to agree to
buy your product (that is, where everyone has "veto power"); but it's not
acceptable to one of them.

He says one way is to make the product acceptable to more people - ensure it
has something that each of them wants ("a bit wider"). Another way is to make
it so compellingly wonderful for one particular person that they will "bully"
their colleagues into getting it ("much deeper").

I'm not sure how applicable this is to software. Often, it's just one party
that needs to be satisfied. But... it can also be an organizational purchase,
where the users have to be happy, the tech support guys have to be happy,
accounting has to be happy, management has to be happy, etc. Each party has
sufficient power to veto a purchase (this isn't always the case!). Seth is
saying you can sweeten the deal slightly, to try to please the hold-outs a
little more (just one of: easier to use, easier to support, easier to pay for,
easier to justify ROI). Or, the other approach, is to make one attribute so
astoundingly amazingly good, that it's so far more than "acceptable" to one
party that you galvanize them into action, to champion your product, calling
in favours, making sacrifices, doing deals to get the other players to agree
(like a senate, right).

He didn't _say_ this, but I think he's implying it's easier to identify the
hold-outs and just please them enough for the purchase to be
unenthusiastically acceptable to them ( _Oh well, I guess we can get it_ ),
instead of exciting one party so much that they move heaven and earth for you.

I reiterate that the starting point is the very special case where several
people have veto power, and the product is not acceptable to one of them.

~~~
SwellJoe
I suspect that to build a very large software business you have to build a
product that can be agreed on by a consensus of people in a company (it may
not be a huge decision-making group, but it does take a couple of people
signing off on most major decisions). I'm having a hard time coming up with
any software product that would be explosively successful without a group of
people being able to agree on it. Office software, CRM, anything on the
server, chat or other interactive tool, pretty much anything someone would pay
for, would likely be chosen more often if the people that person works with or
communicates with also choose the product.

Even games, these days, are often decided on because people can play with
their friends or at least share and trade games amongst their social circle.

Actually, it just struck me how much less solitary computing is than it was
even five or ten years ago. So much of what we do now is interacting with and
sharing with others. Funny how that snuck up on me.

~~~
10ren
Some of these factors are network effects. I conjecture that every product has
_some_ kind of network effect; it's a question of degree. A telephone 100%
network effect; a USB drive might seem to have no network effects, but most
people are biased towards the most popular one.

I think your criteria of "explosively successful" might _require_ very strong
network effects - it certainly requires some way to reach lots of people, and
network effects are one way of doing so (the de.li.ci.ous guy mentioned 3
needed factors, and this was one - he also put a new-to-me twist on it. I'll
try to find the post). If you relax it to modest, steady growth, it might not
require strong network effects (and possibly might be more stable - because
resistant to explosively growing competitors...).

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callmeed
I feel like Godin is going deeper–focusing on gullible startup founders who
think he's saying something revolutionary because he wraps it in a catch-
phrase like _"buffet dilemma"_

Its called vertical/niche market vs. horizontal market. Pick one, build a
great product, and provide great service. Nuff said.

~~~
omouse
Indeed, and it would be better if everyone just read Peter Drucker's
Innovation & Entrepreneurship:
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0887306187/squeakland...](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0887306187/squeakland-20)

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nazgulnarsil
i thought we were supposed to avoid feature creep seth. shouldn't we avoid
brown rice if it isn't part of our core competency? aren't we diluting the
brand?

this is the problem I have with posts like this, they reduce to not very
useful rules of thumb and often wind up contradicting each other.

~~~
cubedice
Sort of like French proverbs or Zen koans, I suppose. The fact that they are
often too general and contradictory doesn't seem to stop older, wiser folk
from repeating them.

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edw519
"So, there are two ways to go. Much deeper, or a bit wider."

Ah, there's only one way to go. Whatever the market is telling you. If you're
not listening to that, all the little hacks in the world won't help you.

~~~
pxlpshr
Market makers would likely disagree with you, but I digress... so very, very
few startups ever reach that level. :)

~~~
billswift
Market makers frequently do neither, they often go off on some tangent that
satisfies desires no one had realized existed before. As long as people are
recommending books, Clayton's "Innovator's Dilemma" is interesting and fairly
useful (the sequels much less so).

