
Not Wanted - nate
http://ninjasandrobots.com/not-wanted/
======
drusenko
This is essentially the point made in the book The Innovator's Dilemma about
disrupting existing markets:

"Disruptive technologies or innovations are innovations that upset the
existing “order of things” in a particular industry. The usual process is a
lower-end innovation that appeals to customers who are not served by the
current market. With time, because the capacity/performance of the innovation
exceeds the market’s needs, the innovation comes to displace the market
incumbents." [0]

[0] [http://www.squeezedbooks.com/articles/the-innovators-
dilemma...](http://www.squeezedbooks.com/articles/the-innovators-dilemma-the-
revolutionary-book-that-will-change-the-way-you-do-business-\(collins-
business-essentials\)-summary.html)

~~~
chavesn
I really recommend watching this video of the author, Clayton Christensen,
talking about the same thing:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSG_d0mmf0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSG_d0mmf0)

> _" "...by competing against non-consumption, all they had to do was make a
> product that was better than nothing. And so when you have a new product,
> it's actually really important that the kind of customers you target, are
> people whose other option is nothing at all, and that way they'll be
> thrilled with a limited product."_

~~~
notastartup
would love to hear an example of this. what does he mean by non-consumption?
he says "infinitely better than nothing" as being key to disrupting.

~~~
aytekin
CRM is a good example. In the past, only big companies could afford them.
These days there are cheap and free alternatives anyone can afford. If there
were no cheap alternatives the only alternative is non-consumption for many
small businesses.

Even my own product, JotForm, is a good example. Web developers or
professional designers don't need it. They can already create forms. People
like teachers, secretaries, school administrators, event organizers who use
jotform would have never considered online forms if there were no tools like
jotform. The other alternative is non-consumption. (paper forms, manually
collecting information)

~~~
notastartup
That's a very good example. Nice design btw, I like how the tool is right in
their face. (how did you create that GUI form like look?)

I wonder what it would be like to market JotForm to a web developer. I find
that web developers automatically think I can do this in X amount of time why
should I pay? It's already a tough sale I can see.

But, focusing on non-technical people, this would be a great alternative, much
better than doing it manually or hiring some guy to create an elaborate web
system.

You've illustrated it well, you just created the tool someone is looking for
to get the job done where non-consumption is the only other choice.

many many upvotes at this entire thread, I feel that it's rewiring how I think
about the product and the target.

~~~
aytekin
"I wonder what it would be like to market JotForm to a web developer."

It would be very hard. That's why we don't target them.

PayPal went after eBay users first because they did not have any good way to
send money. The did not try to convince vendors who can already process credit
cards to use PayPal. They went after non-consumption.

When a new kind of product comes up you see all these pockets of users who are
very passionate about the product because they have no other way to replace
it. It is best to go after these users. They can sustain a business and if
they represent a large/growing market they can grow the business.

------
tptacek
Incidentally, if you haven't tried writing something in Draft, I recommend it
unreservedly. I haven't written a whole lot in it, but for the things I have
written there, the process has been supremely pleasant, particularly when
soliciting opinions from reviewers.

~~~
logicallee
introspectively, given that you recommend it unreservedly, why do you think
you haven't written a whole lot in it?

(no relation to author or project, just curious.)

~~~
tptacek
Most of my writing over the last 6 months has been internal to the company,
and I can't put that kind of content on a third party server, even if I trust
it. For what it's worth, since I use Draft, I told Nate I'd be happy to audit
it _gratis_. He should take me up on that! :)

------
marban

      "An artist is somebody who produces things that people
      don't need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it
      would be a good idea to give them."
    

\-- The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

~~~
mjolk
I wouldn't take advice from Andy Warhol unless you're trying to make a product
that insecure, dumb people want because they want to fit into their
subculture. Or selling drugs.

~~~
marban
I would take advice from Andy Warhol over anyone on the Internet.

Plus, a majority of products in any given category is sold as a result of
insecurity (You've probably heard of the fashion industry).

------
dsr_
I wholeheartedly approve of the notion of finding an underserved market
segment and building tools for them.

I have to worry, though, about naming problems. Draft sounds a lot like Final
Draft, which serves a similar need; it's at draftin.com, which doesn't
immediately come to mind when someone says "You should try this nifty writing
software, it's called Draft."

Miscellaneous criticism: I have no idea of the pricing model. It's not obvious
at all. The settings page is a horror: I love the idea that there's a big blob
of text showing what you select, but asking people to type in the names of
fonts is asking for tribble. Measuring fonts in ems instead of points is
bizarre.

And the help link is an email address. Would it kill you to put up a FAQ or
use the features list as documentation?

~~~
Kiro
I thought Draft was already a successful service. You make it sound like this
is a Show HN for an unknown site. Still good and valid feedback though.

~~~
alphakappa
Whether it is successful or not, it's still new to many in the audience
(including me), so the need for presenting the service well never goes away.

------
javajosh
Anecdotally, most people can't really differentiate between what really needs
to get done, and what their specific tools do. They might not have the
sophistication to be able to abstract "word processor" from "MS Word". To
them, they don't do "word processing", they fire up Word and write. (And
indeed, some people are so confused that they say things like they'll 'load up
Windows to write my paper'.)

The more bespoke the tooling, the more this tends to be true. For example, in
areas like project management, which is not an inherently technical
discipline, you have good project managers clinging to old tools for dear life
because they were really hard to learn, they do the job, and the benefit of
new tools just isn't that great (which is especially true of over-promising
and under-delivering tools). Yes, practitioners use sophisticated tools, but I
think they would be hard pressed to really abstract away what MS Project
_does_ for them.

~~~
kateho
I second that. I was just about to email Nate to ask him how he would deal
with this issue but struggling to articulate it. Thanks!

------
InclinedPlane
This is sort of a corollary of avoiding being too naive when accepting product
feedback. People often don't know how to express what they want, often they
don't even know what they want. For every "shut up and take my money" moment
there are many "I didn't even know I needed/wanted that" moments. So much of
being an effective inventor is being able to have one foot in consumer land
and one foot in product land and be able to translate between them.

------
Aloha
In short, don't build a product for people who know what they need, find
people who need something and build a product for them.

~~~
Jormundir
I'd say "find people who don't know they're doing something inefficiently, and
build a simple, straight-forward product that gives them a more productive
workflow."

~~~
grueful
Or find people who know they're doing something inefficiently, but need it
done badly enough that they're doing it anyway.

Ridiculously common case.

------
kriro
Glad it worked out for the author but it feels like he initially focused on
the wrong thing. Iirc Lean Startup considers right problem, right customer the
most important early decisions.

He eventually got it right by figuring out the right customer but I think the
mistake was starting with "selling a tool" instead of thinking about the
actual problems. It's very possible project managers don't have a pain point
when it comes to their tools (they are "good enough"). Problem and customer
segment are usually tightly coupled. I could be completely wrong but I think
the main discovery here was that "blog posters want to be more
"professional"". Maybe because the tools are helpful but probably also a
healthy dose of "journalism envy" at least initially. I think that's what I'd
focus on and see if it's right (i.e. hammer the "like a pro" line)

------
blzabub
Product/Market fit. Most think about changing the product, this is just
changing the market.

------
cornellwright
I think this more comes to figuring out who the right early adopters are. You
need to have something sufficiently better than what's out there to overcome
inertia and get people to try your product. If you target (in the project
management case) people who use every feature of that project management
software, then you need all those features plus yours, or your new feature has
to be so good that they're willing to throw away all those. If you target the
person who does not yet use/need project management software you have a lot
less to overcome.

------
arkitaip
Basically look for the pro amateur demographic?

------
guard-of-terra
See also: [http://www.steve-yegge.blogspot.ru/2008/08/business-
requirem...](http://www.steve-yegge.blogspot.ru/2008/08/business-requirements-
are-bullshit.html)

and "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster
horses"

------
notastartup
This article was mind blowing for me for the same reasons I experienced
building things for the target group I thought I wanted all this time but
running into the same pattern, the price doesn't justify because it's missing
X features compared to Y's product and maybe we will consider buying it when
we see all the features in an extended free trial and then if we are fully
satisfied then maybe we'll buy. It's impossible to please this crowd of
nitpickers, impossible to match all of their desires.

------
notastartup
if competing for non-consumption and there are others doing this, how do you
stand out? If something is infinitely better than nothing for this non-
consumers how do you stand out from the competitors doing the same thing? How
to charge a premium without driving each other to the bottom?

The message I understood from his lecture video was develop:

1) Something that is infinitely better. My suspicion is that if you are
targeting a group that already has very good tools to do the job, your product
won't be infinitely better until it does feature "A-Z" like your incumbents.

2) Disrupt by targeting the non-consumption. These group of people have no
other alternative to do the job or have technical understanding. Even a crappy
product is better than nothing. Target this for disruption.

Is this correct? Did I miss anything?

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSG_d0mmf0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSG_d0mmf0)

------
PhasmaFelis
This sounds distressingly like "sell substandard products to people who aren't
experienced enough to know better," or "you don't need a good product if
you've got good marketing." I'm not familiar with this guy's products, though.

~~~
emil10001
I disagree. Amateurs don't necessarily need pro tools, they need tools that
help them do the job that they want to do better than either no tools, or poor
tools. They also might get confused and put off by the steep learning curve
offered by some pro tools. E.g. PhotoShop (I don't think I need to say more).

Just because something isn't a good fit for the pro or power user, doesn't
mean that it doesn't have a place in the market, or couldn't be considered
good or useful.

