Kevin Costner is full of sh*t ... when it comes to startups at least. Build it and they will come. I implore you, do not listen to this man! This line of thinking is out in left field (har har).<p>I have to admit, I used to subscribe to this tag line. A few years back, I felt that if the idea was there, all that was barring a venture from success was time, effort, and determination. As a result, several of my early projects were drastically over engineered and tragically under utilized.
I don't recall Kevin blogging about startups. It was a movie. Honestly, this title seems a little over the top.<p>As for the advice... It's good but there is a world of difference between testing something you've built and asking people if they'd want something you haven't built. In "The Innovator's Dilemma," the case of excavators is used as a case study.<p>If you had asked construction managers whether they wanted hydraulic excavators instead of cable excavators, they would have laughed you out of the industry. The hydraulic excavators of the day were flakey and much smaller than the cable excavators. Nobody who was using excavators would want one.<p>The point was that hydraulic excavators ended up creating entirely new markets. Likewise, my own personal example is the GUI. I remember when this was just a research fancy at Xerox. I used a Xerox Star at Humber College in Toronto. Great stuff, but priced in the stratosphere.<p>If you'd asked anyone whether they needed a mouse and bitmapped screen to replace their CP/M word processor, you would have been laughed out onto the sidewalk.<p>Yet look at what we have today. Some things should be shown, and even then you might have to keep plugging until a light goes on and some entirely new market (like desktop publishing) springs up to use your innovation.
I completely agree with this. As the article mentions with shoestring resources it's helpful to make "bang for the buck" choices. For any given successful product, there will be a few things that really resonate with or significantly help the user. The trick is figuring out what these things are. If you hit upon a truly valuable function, chances are your user base will grow even if there is not much else other than that available. A great example of this is Google. When Google was just starting out there were many popular search engines, and the biggest, Yahoo, had tons of money, resources, and content/features available from their homepage. By contrast, Google had a simple search box on their page - but the results returned were clearly superior. The rest, of course, is history. Sure Google now has email, docs, apps, calendar, social services, etc. but they didn't start out that way, and didn't need to. I believe the best strategy is to try and figure out what will really benefit users, not the nice to haves, but what really benefits them, and focus on building that to the best of your ability. Don't sacrifice quality. How you solve the problem should be as top notch as you can make it, but solve the problem and that's it; don't get distracted. Then test it out and see where you stand.
I think usability testing is important(Shout out to Steve Krug:<a href="http://bit.ly/dloM7j" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/dloM7j</a>) but you can't be a slave to it. These days one of the criteria I use when picking services is "how dedicated does the company seem". After having my stuff disappear with a few failed startups I've come to value someone who goes all-in.<p>When I see a startup shooting for "minimally viable" I head in the opposite direction.
I am curious at how Apple does it. With their secretive nature, do they go out to show customers what they are building? Or Steve Jobs just has great insight into what customers need and build it for them.