In his famous essay “How to Make Wealth,” Paul Graham states that one of the ways to make wealth is to make something people want because wealth is what people want.
How do you make something people want? I’ve found there are basically four methods:
- Make something you want
- Make something people are already paying for
- Make something people are searching for
- Make something people are spending time on
These are self-explanatory. If you create anything using one of these methods, you have made something people want. And you can make something great by combining multiple of these methods.
There are other methods, such as making something people are already sharing, but they are complicated.
Think of a great product like Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg wanted the product himself; people were already spending money to communicate with friends and family, and people love to spend time with their friends and know what their colleagues are up to.
For a financial product like Binance, I don’t know if CZ created Binance to satisfy his own desires, but it’s clear that people were already investing money in crypto assets; millions were already searching for how to buy and sell Bitcoin, and traders spend a lot of time on existing trading platforms.
Whitney Wolfe founded Bumble, a popular dating app she wanted to make different. She felt it could change the way humans connect, something she wanted. And it happened that many people were already searching, spending money and time on new dates.
How about a religious product like YouVersion, a Bible app with over 100 million downloads? I believe the founders wanted to make a great Bible app because most Bible apps are simple. People were already looking up Bible verses online, and Christians spend their time and money on Bible-based products.
For a data-based product like monierate.com, we made something we wanted. Many Nigerians check currency exchange rates online and some of them spend money and several minutes a day on trading and money exchange platforms.
If you study any great product, you’ll see it has some or all of these qualities. Either the founders wanted to solve their own problems, create a better alternative to what people spend time and money on, or make something people are looking to get.
Making something people want alone won’t guarantee financial success, as there are other things such as marketing, management, and raising money you may need to execute. But it is the first thing you must get right, or you will fail.
Afterthoughts
Some builders don’t want to build things that already exist, but something that already exists is a good sign that you are making something people want. Facebook wasn’t the fifth social media platform, Binance wasn’t the tenth cryptocurrency exchange, and Stripe wasn’t the third internet payment processor. You want to build something that already exists in some form but with room for improvement. Avoid working on something that doesn’t exist in any form.
If you make things people are already paying for, you know people will pay for it as long as it’s better.
You can make things better by making them faster, cheaper, stronger, more secure, portable, or any other way that people value what you’re making.
You can think of these four tips as a framework for getting great product ideas. You may not need a framework to build anything, but using a framework can save you time, provide assurance, and reduce your chances of making common mistakes.
— Written by Jeremy
