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by AznHisoka 2154 days ago
The last step where you manually do what the product is meant to do really works in 1% of products. Think of all the successful products today: Docusign, Snowflake, Wix, yeah.. not going to happen.

It’s 2020. All the low hanging fruit ideas are gone. Any meaningful product idea requires a bit more complexity in implementing it.
3 comments
skmurphy 2154 days ago
New technologies expose new low hanging fruit. The act as what Taleb calls "half-invented" in AntiFragile, a working implementation applied to the wrong problem. The approach of "service first" or concierge or Wizard-of-Oz is still viable and widely used. I agree it does not work for all product types, but it's still a very useful way to defer a lot of implementation expense but still determine product desirability.
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lvturner 2154 days ago
I know several people who would pay good money to have lengthy and repetitive forms (school permission slips for field trips) filled in 'automatically' and doing this manually should be a cinch!

So I'm not sure I agree with your hypothesis.

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AznHisoka 2154 days ago
Really? Paying for someone to fill in forms? If it’s trivial like a field trip, I don’t see anyone paying for that. If it’s important like a legal document, you dont want someone to fill it in for you.
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lvturner 2154 days ago
I thought the same, but I saw the size of the form for the field trip and the detail they were asking for (most liability issues to absolve the school of responsibilities) - though, I don't think it would bother me personally enough to want to do it.

And important legal documents... Wouldn't you hire a lawyer or a solicitor to deal with them?

I think even a will - I would probably pay a nominal fee to have one generated for me, on the assumption that I can modify the final version before I personally sign it off on it.

Though the point wasn't really the forms, the point was more that there is a near infinite level of low hanging fruit, it's just not always apparent based on your own situation (and to an extent country!) and set of tasks/frustrations.

Another example that came to mind would be automatically updating all my stuff when I change address (banking details, car registration, driving license etc etc) sure there is a huge trust issue with this but with care, probably not totally insurmountable.

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quickthrower2 2154 days ago
The ideas are gone but there is so much stuff I can see say my dev team paying for if it existed to save us time.
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