[vonklaus]

the horribly over used Ford quote:

> if i'dve asked people what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses.

is applicable here, much more so than in the battlecries of every company making something no one wants for some hypothetical market that doesn't exist.

While I don't understand the author's biz/space enough to comment situationally, this is a key insight. People almost always miss this. Users want to get to places much faster, and much more confortably in the Ford example. They speak in solutions and it is an entrepreneurs job to translate this into problems, rank them, and provide actionable responses.

The flaw I believe in your example, could be a few things. possibly if you are paid by a customer directly & are more a consultant/contractor than a SaaS provider, well, that's how you get paid. However, generalizing about a feature, especially without behavioural feedback is dangerous. if it is very easy to do, of course do it. However, the risk of a feature is some subset of:

* value to customer

* conviction/data in that value prop. & feedback

* difficulty to achieve

* is it replicable. how valuable is this to all my customers? is it very valuable to a few, or semi-valuable to many/all.

This is again, highest level, even in the last point above you can see the thread fan out.

So, again, i am bot super familiar with the authors company but I agree wholeheartedly with his process of decision making. Consider it is possible that either etsy was a big client, thus worth retaining for markwt goodwill & rev, or that it was quite easy to open an endpoint to data you already had, and thus doesn't discount this methodology

[stephengillie]

The somewhat underused 3M quote (paraphrased):

> When someone is shopping for a drill bit, they don't want you to sell them a drill bit. They want you to sell them a hole in their wall.

If you're wondering, most people will put a nail or hook in the hole in their wall, and hang a picture or something. 3M would go on to sell them tape or other wall adhesives instead of a hole in their wall.

Rephrased to correlate to this thread:

> When someone is shopping for document signing software, they don't want you to sell them software. They want you to sell them a set of agreements already negotiated with their business partners.

Don't confuse the tool with the goal.

[vonklaus]

I agree with this and I think it compliments Ford, or at least my interpretation.

I've put a fair share of holes in walls and also fastened plenty of material together. No one would buy a drill for one hole in a wall but there is a massive amount of leverage in being able to put thousands in quickly, ect.

> don't confuse the tool with the goal.

I think this is the lens/acid test. For your correlation above, it sounds like it was harder to sell them automated agreements than it was for them to manually produce them. Or at least, the perceived opportunity cost was higher and the cost to educate them otherwise was higher than the authors profit marg.

edit: just looked at your profile; very nice array of quotes you have.

[rhizome]

The weird thing is, isn't it obvious that the first thing to do is to replicate all of the functionality of the customers' current package? It's nice to get a laundry list of possible future features, but when testing indicates that people are only using it for the minority of their contracts which fit the software, that's a signal that besides the laundry list, the software is still incomplete. Did they really shut down due to an inability to prioritize enhancements? Kinda sounds that way, but runway is runway.