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Is your product a “must have” or “nice to have”? (venturebeat.com)
14 points by bhousel on Oct 13, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments



I would say even more, every product has to be first a "nice to have" and hopefully for you to become later a "must have". Nowadays in our society we already can live a very comfortable life, there is no real "must have".

I support my point here saying that we already have a product that saves you money, but not a single person that I have talked about it was impressed by this feature alone. Instead the other way round if they like the product and I tell them about the cost saving it is a serious factor for them to decide to adopt it.


The article in my opinion does not say much, but the following paragraph caught my attention:

>>"In the end, the best way to test whether you have a ‘must have’ product is to threaten to take the prototype away from your early users," says Rakowski. "If they don’t riot, start again."<<

Is this really doable? How can you threaten to take the prototype away?



Another way to test would be to use survey.io: http://startup-marketing.com/free-customer-development-help-...


Nice to have. GODDAMMIT. runs off and looks for a real job


I always thought it was a mistake to position your business as if your product was a "must have", mainly because it's not.

Treat it as a "nice to have". That will force you to do everything else better.

A lot of people have learned the hard way in the past year that very little is a "must have".


It's more important as a mental exercise than as absolute advice. Some people put it another way: is your product a vitamin or a painkiller?

For a business to become successful, the product will need to become a must have at some point. If it's not right now, then you need to keep pursuing it until it is.


Vitamin vs painkiller is a better analogue. Consider Facebook, it isn't really a "must have", but seems to be doing just fine


I couldn't disagree more. When you start using Facebook, it becomes a must have. When I went about deleting all my online accounts, it was one of the two I didn't get rid of. If I got rid of that, I'd lose the most valuable communications medium I've got.


Everything online is merely "nice to have" but we are still capable of becoming dependent on it. ie: google/gmail




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