Why you should pick an idea that has Product "It" Factor.
Back in 1999, I went to see Ray Manzarek (the keyboard player from the Doors) perform a one man show. Mostly his show was spoken word about the history of the Doors.
He said something I'll never forget:
One day when we were rehearsing, Jim said, "Man, this music has the 'It' Factor. You just can't stop yourself from moving when you hear it."
That's when I knew we were on to something.
Before then, I had heard other bands with the "It" Factor. They were all the cool bands. They were going somewhere. You can't define the "It" Factor. You just know it when you hear it. If a band doesn't have the "It" Factor, it ain't going nowhere.
It's another mental model I used as a guiding principle.
I'm putting this lesson here, just before you pick your final idea, because I've noticed a few founders in the Academy don't pick a final idea with Product "It" Factor.
That makes things difficult.
It's hard to work the rest of the program if your final idea doesn't have Product "It" Factor.
- It's hard to find people who get excited
- It's hard to get people to engage
- It's hard to grow a Seed Group
- It's hard to get first customers
Conversely, if your idea does have Product "It" Factor, you'll find the exact opposite to be true.
This is really an extension of the drilling for oil analogy. If you work with a market and a product that has "It" Factor, then you'll be drilling for much less time before you hit that oil.
Just like Ray Manzarek says, it's hard to define Product "It" Factor, but in our case, I'll try to make it more tangible.
In broad terms, it's something your target market gets very excited about rather than just being "meh" or thinking it is a "nice to have."
To further clarify, I'm going to break the Product "It" Factor down into 5 forces.
Not scientific, but you get the idea.
- Force #1: BETTER LIFE
You can make someone better at their job, life, passion. - Force #2: MORE MONEY
You can help someone earn more money. - Force #3: LESS PAIN
You can solve a massive pain point for someone. - Force #4: MORE TIME
You can automate annoying repetitive tasks for someone. - Force #5: MORE HAPPY
You can entertain someone.
Now let's imagine that each force had a scale from 0-5.
For example, I'm going to have a stab at measuring Product "It" Factor for Nugget.
Nugget
- BETTER LIFE: 5 (freedom, satisfaction, etc.)
- MORE MONEY: 5
- LESS PAIN: 3 (all content one place)
- MORE TIME: 4 (earn while you sleep)
- MORE HAPPY: 4 (goal achievement, etc.)
I put the force at 5 for BETTER LIFE and MORE MONEY because (assuming Nugget works) that is what Nugget actually offers in pure form, if a founder follows the program and doesn't drop out.
In some ways, this is a chicken and egg question. After all, part of the validation process itself is to discover if your idea has Product "It" Factor.
That said, you can still have a stab at measuring the Product "It" Factor using the above chart.
If you're honest with yourself, you'll probably have a pretty good idea which (if any) of your top 3 picks has a strong "It" Factor.
Of course, as with all this stuff, this is not an exact science! To help make it easier to quantify, I'll include a few examples below.
Some markets lend themselves toward Product "It" Factor more than others.
For example @johngarcia's idea, Quilt, has strong Product "It" Factor because his market, quilters, are passionate about what they do, and no one has ever made good software for them.
Quilt - Quilt Design Software
- BETTER LIFE: 5 (satisfaction of creating beautiful things)
- MORE MONEY: 1 (maybe they sell quilts)
- LESS PAIN: 5 (lots of repetitive tasks automated)
- MORE TIME: 5 (lots of repetitive tasks automated)
- MORE HAPPY: 3 (makes quilting so much more fun)
@chrisfranklin has found it easy to build a seed group with his idea, Get Upgraded (training on how to land a job in a top-tier tech company). It strikes such a fundamental need. Also, the market is enthusiastic.
Get Upgraded - Work at a Top-Tier Tech Company
- BETTER LIFE: 5 (day-to-day dream job existence)
- MORE MONEY: 5 (better job, better pay)
- LESS PAIN: 5 (it sucks to not have a job)
- MORE TIME: 0
- MORE HAPPY: 5 (man with job he likes is happy)
@jeanpaul has found a B2B play with the "It" Factor in fire.ci. Devs love to have cool tools, and companies want their devs to be more productive. Win/Win.
Fire CI - Local Distributed Continuous Integration
- BETTER LIFE: 4 (it's great to be a better developer)
- MORE MONEY: 2 (save money vs. other CI tools)
- LESS PAIN: 5 (it sucks to wait for builds)
- MORE TIME: 5
- MORE HAPPY: 2
Ok, so those are some ideas that have strong Product "It" Factors. Here are some ideas that had low ones.
@habibalamin Spent some time validating the idea of a diff software for writers. In the end, he moved on because it was difficult to build a seed group. Most people he contacted about it were "meh" about the idea.
Different - Writer Diff Tool
- BETTER LIFE: 1
- MORE MONEY: 0
- LESS PAIN: 2
- MORE TIME: 0
- MORE HAPPY: 1
@chrisfranklin could not get more than a "meh" for his music tutor software idea. Most instructors were generally happy using notebooks and were not making enough money for a subscription service.
Music Studio Plus - Music Teacher Management Software
- BETTER LIFE: 1
- MORE MONEY: 2
- LESS PAIN: 1
- MORE TIME: 2
- MORE HAPPY: 1
- When picking your first idea to validate, if you can pick an idea with a strong Product "It" Factor, it will make it much easier to build and engage your seed group (which often becomes your first customers).
- The market you pick plays a big role in Product "It" Factor. If your market is a passionate niche, they will get more excited about any idea than, say, merchant bankers. In other words, the mere fact that your base market is passionate will increase Product "It" factor. In turn, this will make it easier to build and engage your Seed Group.
This is why it is a balancing act to pick an idea that seems profitable (like selling to accountants) vs a market that is highly passionate (like indi-game developers and enthusiasts).
To further illustrate, if a Product "It" Factor lights a spark in 10,000 indi-game developers vs a Product "It" Factor solves a pain point for some accountants it might be worth your while looking at the lower price point higher volume market. - If you are finding it difficult to guess at what your idea's "It" factor might be, reach out to me or @jjn in Slack. Let's talk it through.
This whole lesson is similar to the idea of "make something people want," but we're taking things one step further and trying to have a better guess about what people might want.
We're hyper-iterating as much as possible up-front, before we move into the harder work of building a Seed Group.
Useful or interesting discussion snippets I've had with founders about this subject.
@dylan: Reflecting back on my difficulty landing on an idea with promise. After reading through the advice from Justin and Jeremy I think my issue was that I came with ideas and not a good understanding of pain points that these ideas would solve. I should have actually just built out a list of pain points initially. That likely would have gotten me in the correct mindset.
Here is a video by a Stanford/Google alumni Alberto Savoia who backs up what has been said here. Well worth watching.