| The authors advice - >Make something the mainstream market doesn’t want now, but will want later. seems rather different from the thinking of the Trello team when they actually made Trello, as described by Joel Splosky: >After ten years in management I still never knew what anyone was supposed to be working on. Once in a while I would walk around asking everyone what they were doing, and half the time, my reaction was “why the hell are you working on THAT?” So one of the teams started working on finding better ways to keep track of who was working on what. It had to be super simple and friction-free so that everyone would use it, but it had to be powerful, too. >...led us to the idea that became Trello. Pretty soon we had four programmers and two summer interns working on it. We started dogfooding the product when it was only 700 lines of code, and even in that super-simple form, we found it incredibly useful. So basically they built it to scratch their own itch, not as some disruptive masterplan. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2011/09/13/announcing-trello/ |
I firmly believe you need to dogfood your own product in order to fully understand its potential. How can you solve a problem you don't understand and what better way to understand a problem than to experience it first hand?
A product can be shiny and "awesome" all it wants; if it doesn't solve an actual problem, or isn't convenient enough to solve the problem, it just wont last.