Why Killer Products Don't Sell: How to run your company to a new set of rules

excerpt

Some killer products really don’t sell

So many products, so few sales

There are great products in the marketplace, but great products don’t automatically mean overnight success – or even long-term success. In many cases, really innovative products not only fail to capture the market, but are swamped by inferior competition. Stories of entrepreneurial success and failure tend to focus on the product, without looking at the company behind the product: the culture, the business model, the sales approach, the back-office support. But this is where the magic ingredients are mixed into the secret sauce.

Despite highly visible failures, the entrepreneurial spirit is stronger than ever in every corner of the world. This is fuelled partially by the relative ease with which a software product or website offering can be brought to market. And now, software is a critical and compelling part of every piece of hardware.

Consider the iPhone – without the beautifully tactile user interface it would just be another elegant (and expensive) piece of jewelry; or your BlackBerry – which needs layer upon layer of technology to push your messages to you wherever you are in the world, and bill you for the pleasure.

The line between a product and a service is becoming blurred in many areas. Therefore, we will use the term ‘product’ in the book to mean hardware, hardware + software, software installed on a device, Software as a Service (SaaS), or a pure service offering.

With the constant innovation of the software development platforms, it is easier to develop really exciting and compelling user experiences. Added to this, the range of delivery platforms is expanding: from the wacky Microsoft Surface™, through laptops, to smartphones which are permanently connected to the GPS and the Web. And now the iPhone has been opened up as a development platform. We need to be clear that innovative or disruptive products don’t exist only in the technology sector, but often a product or a service is made possible by back-office technology.

On television we watch programs like The Apprentice or Dragons’ Den, where eager, passionate, blinded, and desperate entrepreneurs and inventors believe they have created the killer product. The product which will have the world beating a path to their doors. These people are a microcosm of the greater business world, where large and expensive R&D departments go through essentially the same process.

Possibly the greatest output from R&D departments is blind faith. Many R&D teams adopt the attitude of “Don’t trouble us with your talk of sales, delivery, or measurement since we are not just inventors – we are artists in our industry.”

A small tangent – Blind Faith. This was formed by Steve Winwood and Eric Clapton when they were both at a loose end after the break ups of Traffic and Cream at the end of 1968. Winwood and Clapton got together in early 1969 at Clapton’s house to jam, but word got out and Ginger Baker turned up to
join in on drums. Ric Grech, from Family, was the last to join, on bass to free up Steve Winwood. I suppose one could say that this super-group had the makings of a killer product? Anyway, Robert
Stigwood got them into a studio where they recorded several excellent songs, but the rush to release an album meant that the second side was filled with a long and rather uninteresting jam.
They debuted in front of 100,000 people at a free concert in Hyde Park and then set off for a USA tour. Blind Faith fell apart on tour in August 1969 due to the uncritical hero worship and adulation from the American crowds, which offered no challenge for their musicianship, and the lack of opportunity to develop their music privately. Exit one killer product.

Ooga Labs is a very good example of this mass production of new products. Ooga Labs is a technology greenhouse based in downtown San Francisco developing four to six consumer Internet businesses simultaneously. Their purpose is to build unique Internet products to be used by millions, and Ooga has a company culture capable of churning these new products out ad infinitum. Ooga Labs is self-funded and thus has total control over the direction of its products. It only develops its own ideas and, of those products which it creates, only the ones that appear to Ooga to have a chance of becoming the next big thing will be fully developed. Ooga relies on finding the best software engineers because at Ooga, ‘building stuff’ is job number one and so engineering is skill number one. By developing multiple products under one roof, Ooga Labs believes it has the best of a startup, a big company, an R&D lab, a movie studio, and a venture capital firm all under one roof. Ooga has set a goal of eight ‘company starts’ in four years. Only time and history will tell us if the model works.

These days it is easy to build products, and there are more places where they can be used – which sounds great. But remember, success isn’t proportional to the quality or the degree of innovation of the product – and business buyers and consumers are swamped with choice. Paint all this innovation on the canvas of a rapidly evolving marketplace and truly global competition, and the statistical chance of failure is huge.

But that hasn’t stopped innovation. More products are being brought to market every year, and probably another 100 will have been launched worldwide before you finish reading this book.9 That can only spell one thing: 98 of those 100 products launched will be stillborn, with the entrepreneurial flames burning within many talented people being snuffed out, along with their savings or investors’ funds.