Working on a product is something I truly enjoy. It’s a multi-disciplinary effort juggling between technology, design and business. You have to approach things from different perspectives and when everything aligns, you’ll create something extremely valuable.
If you have attended any hackathons or business pitching competitions, you might have been introduced to the Business Model Canvas. It’s a tool to help you structure and design your startup’s business model.
After building the main user journey for Ruminate.io, I focused on getting it ready for its Alpha release. The objective of this release is to gather feedback from others using it so I can decide where to take it next.
As you can see on the screenshots below, I marked the non working parts of the app as coming soon so I can get the app out the door quicker.
It has been years since I’ve worked on a side project. So when I found some spare time and an idea that seems interesting along with the arrival of Phoenix LiveView, I started working on Ruminate.io.
This is the first of a series of articles to recount the entire journey of building this app. For my learnings of Phoenix LiveView while working on Ruminate.io, check out this article.
We have built quite a few apps over the years at Flexnode and Showtimes.my is one our favourites. It is also quite popular with around 200k hits monthly. Unfortunately, the 5 year old app broke and stop working recently, so John and I decided it is about time to rebuild it.
Since we are rebuilding the app, it is the perfect time to do some work on the dated design. Having used the app for years, we are quite familiar with the shortcomings. In this post, I'm going to walk you through some of our initial thought process we had when building the original app and what we are changing in the redesign.
I've noticed that I'm now more of a mainstream user than an advanced or early adopter for computers. I used to build my own system by buying the parts individually but now I prefer a complete solution like Macs.
Obviously, Apple products are far from being mainstream but the idea of making them to be more of an appliance is a good one. Setting up a computer should be like using a toaster for the first time.
It's nice when you have products that just works when you turn it on.
Drew Houston from Dropbox posted a slide about lessons they learned from building, launching and promoting their product. The first lesson was to learn early and learn often. You need to get something out to the users to get feedback. The catch is you need to build something that they want. They also found out that marketing using adwords didn't work out for them because users rarely search for a product like Dropbox. Instead, they rely on word of mouth from their fans to reach new users. The most important was to make the product work as it should.
There are many more insights about how to market a product like Dropbox. For example, it's also important to know the market type for your product and how it fits into your user's life. Check out the slides below.
Complements or complementary goods are products that are consumed together and if either of the product's price increase, demand for both products will be reduced. A common example would be a computer and the Operating System (e.g. Windows) that comes with it. Because complements are consumed together, there is always this tension between the products to reduce the price of the other in order to increase demand. Dell would want Windows to be cheaper so it can reduce the overall cost of the PC while Windows would also benefit from cheaper PC which will sell more Operating Systems.
There are some products which must be consumed with another. These are called perfect complements and the simplest example would be the left and right shoe. The sales ratio between them is always 1 to 1 because you buy them in pairs.
In order to control the price and demand, many companies will try to control both ends of the complements. Twitter's recently bought Tweetie (a 3rd party Twitter Client) to do just that. A cheaper (free) and better Twitter client will allow more users to use Twitter.
Complements can be your best partner or competitor. If you are just starting out, embracing your complements is one way to improve the attractiveness of your product. Microsoft funded most of their XBox games for that very reason. However, Microsoft is also been known to destroy their complements by bundling complementary apps directly in their products.
Many people cited their reason to buying the iPhone is for the thousands of applications in the App Store. In this case, the iPhone and the applications are complementary. If you are still interested in reading more about complements, check out these articles by Chris Dixon.
To decide if a product is better than the other, we normally compare their features list. But, if the products aren't in the same category, this doesn't work so well. This is why I think comparing the Apple iPad to laptops, iPod Touch or netbooks is pointless and irrelevant. When Apple entered the mobile phone market, they didn't care if their iPhone was lacking in features. Instead, they focused on what they thought was more important to a phone user. The iPhone isn't a phone for everyone but there was enough people that loved it.
After the App Store was added to the iPhone, you started to see the other mobile manufacturers attempting to match this feature by building their own. All of a sudden, the once-lacking-in-feature phone is now the one to beat.
I think the key to building a revolutionary product is to make your competitors' features list irrelevant. Invent your own category and if you succeed, your product's features list will then be the industry standard.
A while ago I posted bout 37signals's new book REWORK. They posted all of the illustrations found in the book on Flickr. Each and every one of them are custom designed by Mike Rohde. Here are some of my favorite ones
A group of designers came up with an idea to help those who can't tell if a fruit is rotten, pick the fresh ones.
In supermarkets where loads of veggies is stacked and dumped, freshness may not be a priority. Keeping a track of all that’s been brought in can be time consuming and not all buyers may have a knack for freshness count. The Fresh Code offers a simple solution to this problem; it’s an intelligent barcode with a graph that indicates the freshness level. As time passes by, the graph on the barcode keeps receding, till it finally reaches “0”; indicating that the veggie needs to be dumped and not sold - Yanko Design
If only they have one that also tell you if you are being ripped off by the supermarket. I might actually enjoy shopping then.
