Great Product Isn’t Enough

People think success of failure is on the idea of the product. I shouldn't name this company, but one of the competitors of Yammer, which launched at the same time, was this other founder, a direct competitor. We did the same thing, we marketed the same way. And this founder was a really good product person and really believed in value and product and product features and just invested heavily there to improve the product and make it better. Made a great product. We crushed them. We crushed them because it turned out just great product isn't enough. It's also about distribution and friction of value and all these other things. We said, okay, we need to build the value hypothesis to answer that question to a minimum bar. And then we got to go to other things. Now we're going to invest in distribution and customer acquisition and monetization and so on. So this huge mistake people make is going into diminishing returns is saying, oh, I'm not getting enough users, I'm just going to keep making the product better. That's not how this works. You're not getting enough users. Figure out why that is. Don't rabbit hole on particular hypotheses. Make the list of questions and the moment you have even a poor answer for one of them, move on to the next one. Because you've got to get through all of them. You can have an amazing product. You can answer two thirds of the questions and still fail. Decide the priority of those questions you need to answer. How easy or hard are they to answer? How critical is it to know the answer? What is an acceptable answer or you'll give up the product. That's the kind of sort of strategy behind companies that I think are important to develop.