Scott Cook: 'Market Leader' Means Nothing

How many people here pay bills sometime in a month? Raise your hand. Okay, that's most. Most of you must have good roommates who pay the rest of them. How many of you do graphs of your finances or balance sheets? Raise your hand. Yeah, that's one or two. So people stick with the basics because they don't like doing this stuff. That's what the research showed, the interviews. So that confirmed, I was thinking. But then there was this pesky problem of competitors. This was not a new idea. There were a couple dozen products already on the market, software products that ran on Apple II computers that would do personal finance. And then they were being ported to the IBM. And so I bought the market leader and the product that sold reasonably well. And my theory was that the big benefit people want, what's the improvement in their life? You always got to ask, what's the improvement in the customer's life they most want? My theory was it was to eliminate the time and hassle. I bought this product, tried it. It was a product called Home Accountant, and it was well named. I think accountants would have loved it. But it made the problem slower, harder. It took more work, it was harder to use than doing it by hand. I said, this is the reverse of what people want. So it seemed to me, or at least there's an incongruity between what I learned on the phone calls and what this product does. It was obscure and hard. Like if you wanted to categorize your rent payment to a category called rent, you had to remember a code number for rent instead of just typing rent. So this led to a problem where I couldn't square the circle between the inconsistency of what consumer said and what their behavior was. They were buying this product, it was on best seller list. So I then went. So I got to talk to users now. To find users, I went to people in computer stores, employees, people in the computer publications, and interviewed a bunch of them. First question was, have you tried any personal finance software product? 65% said yes. Then I asked, do you use any personal finance software product? 4% said yes. So what does that data tell you? They liked the proposition. They hated the product. You got a product problem. Then I asked, why did you quit? And the overwhelming response was, oh, it was too hard, too slow, took more time than it was worth. So it was a direct confirmation of the theory that I developed from the research.