Sachit Gupta warns against building products in isolation. An Instagram star with 2 million followers sold only 36 t-shirts because she never validated demand first. Amazon writes a press release before development to force teams to answer who it's for and what problem it solves.
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There's this really interesting story of how this Instagram star had 2 million followers and couldn't even sell 36 t-shirts. Most creators, when they start thinking about a product, they sit in their apartment, they like come up with like random product ideas. This looks cool, I'm gonna sell it. And then they put it out on blast and they're like, shit, where are the sales? But if you think about any sort of like form of product development, it always starts with this phrase of like, who is it for and what are they trying to do? Amazon actually has this really interesting thing where if you're an employee at Amazon and you wanna propose a new product, You cannot start building a product until you write a press release for it. Because by writing a press release, you really focus on not just what the product and its features are, you focus on who it's for and what the benefits are for the users. And so once you have really like alignment on that, then you build the product. And the mistake that creators make is instead of doing that, instead of actually talking to their audience, they basically just sit in their apartment, come up with a product and launch it, and then they wonder why they didn't make any sales.