✨ Hi, I’m Sara! In this newsletter, I share my musings at the intersection of tech, product, and human tinkering, with the aim of navigating business and life in the Technology Era with purpose. Subscribe to join me on this journey and check out the Polyweb podcast.

P.S. If you were a subscriber of "The Plunge Club," thanks for sticking with me! After taking a long hiatus from writing, I've returned to my first passion and rebranded the newsletter as Polyweb, to compliment the podcast. I'm thrilled to have you along for this next chapter. If you’ve got something you’d like some advice on, don’t hesitate to reply to this email and ask.

If you have been building products for a while, you have been there. At some point in your career, it happened. So let’s talk about it.
Welcome to the first part of a 4-part series about why products fail and how to avoid it.

Here are 4 big reasons why your product might fail:

1. Failure in premise: You picked the wrong problem to solve.

2. Failure in execution: You picked the right problem to solve, but you built the wrong solution.

3. Failure in launch: You picked the right problem to solve, you built the right solution, but you launched it wrong.

4. Failure in scalability: You built a product that works initially but fails to scale with increased users or complexity.

In this issue, we will focus on the first type of failure, the failure in premise.

Product Failure #1: Picking the Wrong Problem

It all starts with these three words:

“ I have an idea!”

Most products begin like that, with an idea, a belief, and a somewhat formed solution in mind.

But what if that belief doesn’t match reality?

A failure in premise isn't about building a bad product; it's about building a product based on a flawed or non-existent problem. It’s like building a castle on the sand. Stunning, until the waves demolish it to nothing.

So, how can you tell if your idea is a sandcastle, before investing months in building it?

The Many Shapes of Premise Failure

Premise failure creeps in through various avenues:

• Lack of Market Research: Not enough time spent understanding the target audience, their pain points, and needs.

• Failing to Target the Right Customers: Aiming to serve too many types of customers can water down your product’s value.

• Echo Chamber Effect: Building products based on internal beliefs or opinions without external validation. This often happens when a team falls in love with a solution before confirming customer needs.

• Chasing Trends: Jumping on the latest tech or market trend without assessing its longevity or relevance to solve the actual problem. We've seen this with Web3 and AI, where companies grab a hot technology and then scramble to find a problem it can solve.

• Over-reliance on Personal Experiences: Assuming that a problem one faces personally is widespread without validation.

• Ignoring Feedback: Not taking early user feedback seriously or dismissing negative feedback as outliers.

How to Spot a "Failure in Premise"

Essentially, any sustained disconnect between your assumptions and observed reality is a red flag. The key is being intellectually honest with yourself and proactively questioning if you've validated the right problem, not just your solution. If usage data and behaviors deviate from your projections, it's time to reassess the premise.

Here are some common warning signs your premise may be cracking:

Negative feedback: if multiple user interviews reveal different problems or underserved needs than expected. This means that you might have framed the problem incorrectly.

Low User Engagement: If users aren’t using your product as anticipated, the problem you’re solving may not be crucial enough for them. Example: Google+ aimed to rival Facebook but had low user engagement because it lacked a unique value that appealed to users.

Difficulty in User Acquisition: If you're struggling to acquire users despite marketing efforts, it could be a sign that there's no real problem worth solving.

Lack of Organic Growth: Great products often grow organically through word of mouth. If users aren't recommending your product to others, again it might not be addressing a significant problem. Products like Dropbox and Airbnb saw organic growth because they addressed clear market needs and users naturally recommended them.

Difficulty in Explaining the Product: If it's challenging to explain what your product does and why it's valuable in a simple sentence, the premise might be too convoluted or not well-defined.

Reluctance in Team Belief: If your own team is hesitant or doesn't fully believe in the product, it can be a sign that the premise is weak. The team's belief is often a reflection of the product's true value.

Like a spiderweb fracturing, these signal a disconnect between your perception and reality. The only fix is stepping back to properly re-validate.

Failure or an Opportunity to Pivot?

A failure in premise isn't always the end of the road; it's only a true failure if you stick rigidly to your initial idea, ignoring feedback from the validation phase. Many of today’s successful companies started very differently from the entities we recognize now.

Here are some illustrious examples:

• Twitter: Began as Odeo, a podcast platform. Pivoted to microblogging when Apple launched iTunes podcasting.

• Instagram - Began as a location check-in app called Burbn, pivoted to photo filters and sharing

• Slack - Originated as a game called Glitch, pivoted to workplace collaboration

• Nintendo - Founded as a playing card company in 1889, pivoted to video games

• YouTube - Started as a video dating site, pivoted to user-generated video sharing

• Pinterest - Began as a shopping app called Tote, pivoted to digital pinboard

The 7 Tactics to Avoid Failure in Premise

Here are the 7 tactics I’ve found useful for sidestepping premise failure:

1. Separate Problem Discovery from Solution Discovery

This tactic alone has resolved 80% of issues for me. By keeping problem discovery distinct from solution discovery, I've minimized my biases and broadened the problem framing, avoiding early commitment to a specific solution.

2. Use Jobs-To-Be-Done to Map Competing Problems

Problems come with nuances. Frameworks like "5 whys" and jobs-to-be-done can unearth the core of a problem for a specific market and explore parallel problem threads before zooming in on promising directions. In my interview with Tony Ulwick, the creator of the jobs-to-be-done framework, he explains how he blends surveys, interviews, and focus groups to pinpoint a market's problems. After accumulating a robust list of problems, he asks the target audience to rank them by importance.

3. A/B Problem Testing

If you're still on the fence about the most valuable option after the jobs-to-be-done process, present two or more different problems to the target audience and see which one resonates more. In the past, I've used surveys or landing pages, presenting various problems the product could solve, measuring engagement and interest.

4. Pre-Sell or Crowdfund

This method is a surefire way to confirm that your problem is worth solving. If you can find a niche of people who will pay you to develop or order your product before it even exists, that’s a clear sign your premise might be spot on.

5. Competitor and Broader Market Analysis

Users' willingness to pay is vital, but not the only factor in validating your premise. Understanding what competitors are doing is a key step in problem discovery. If no one is addressing the problem, dig deeper to understand why. If the market is an overcrowded red ocean, with numerous competitors vying for customer attention, standing out will be tough without a well-defined, specific problem to solve. The same goes for market trends, especially with new technologies. Shifts in technologies and trends could make a problem you're trying to solve irrelevant or outdated – or reveal exciting new problems to explore.

6. Falsify Assumptions Through Pre-Mortems

Another favorite tactic: gather your team and imagine it's one year in the future. Your product has failed due to a flawed premise. Generate hypotheses about why this hypothetical failure occurred. What incorrect assumptions were made? This approach psychologically shifts from rationalizing your plans to actively disproving them and brings hidden doubts to the surface early, when you can still test them.

7. Red Team Analysis

Borrowing from political strategies, candidates often have someone on their team formulate the toughest questions to refine their responses before a public debate. Similarly, have a separate team (the "Red Team") challenge the product premise and try to find flaws. Regular Red Team sessions, aimed solely at challenging existing assumptions and premises, prove most effective.

Navigating through product failures it's part of the journey of building products. Recognizing and learning from a faulty premise can steer you away from persistent issues and towards sustainable solutions. The key takeaway? Validate problems rigorously before exploring solutions, and remember: a pivot is not a setback, it’s a strategic sidestep.

The “Now” section

🎧 What I am listening to: The conversation between Lenny Rachitsky and Karri Saarinen, CEO of Linear, about their distinctive product development. With just one product manager and flexible, project-based teams, Linear's approach is notably unique.

📚 What I am reading: Evolve your Brain by Dr. Joe Dispensa. I have mixed feelings regarding this book. While repetitively lengthy, its blueprint for belief change and brain rewiring is as alluring as a siren's song to a lone sailor. I’ll experiment and keep you updated.

🥁 What I am doing: Kicked off season two of the Polyweb podcast. Give it a look!

🧐 Question I am asking myself:

We spend all our lives with a constant companion, an internal voice that never leaves us alone. But how are we talking to ourselves? Are we thinking of ourselves with kindness or are we our harshest critique? By pondering this question, I aim to be more mindful and embrace a kinder, more accepting inner dialogue.

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