Monday, December 6, 2010

3 Lessons from Beyond the Grave

This post was a terrific collection of lessons learned from discontinued products. Boiling it down, there are a three themes that dominate (at least to me):

  • Revenue. Don't just build solutions that people want. Build solutions that people will pay for.
    • Corollary 1: Building anything costs money. Eventually you gotta pay for it.
    • Corollary 2: Never underestimate the marketing power of "free".
  • Usability. You always fail by making manual something that can be automated. (Or, put another way: Failing to automate is automatically failing.)
  • Strategy. Don't build anything that doesn't advance your market strategy. Great ideas can still be distractions.
    • Corollary: Opportunity cost is really, really important. On a related note, I'm reading a book right now about the prices of things that is tremendously eye-opening. I usually just do reviews on goodreads.com, but this one will be featured here, it's been so good.