I Dismantled My Product Failures Into A Single Failure Story

Why is there so much failed technology out there?

 Not bad technology.

Failed.

There’s a lot of good technology that failed and that’s what makes me scratch my head as a technologist sometimes. If the technology is good, it should succeed, right?

 Said no savvy business person ever.

But developers say that all the time. "All we have to do", says the developer, "is build the greatest technology the world has ever seen, and all will flow from there."

Yeah.

That’s true sometimes, but even then, even when you have built a great technology, if the business around that technology is not good enough to support the technology, the product will fail.

I remember building a technology I thought was great, a number of years ago. It wasn’t spectacular, but it was good and it did what it had to do. It allowed retail merchants to use their existing merchant account to perform mobile transactions as well. A mobile payment solution.

What was interesting about this technology, was that no one was doing that at that time so I had the first-mover advantage. This was a big opportunity.

I got a lot of pats on the back for that technology.

I even went on to win a national pitch competition with this particular product. It was exciting. Everyone was excited. I was onto something.

But it eventually failed. I eventually failed. Everything collapsed. 

The real question is why.

I could write a whole book with how many times I experienced this story. And I’m sure there’s a lot of entrepreneurs who could relate to this.

The plot goes something like this.

 1.    Get an idea.

2.    Build technology around that idea.

3.    Make the technology as great as possible.

4.    Try to find a way to explain how great your technology is.

5.    Win pitching competitions.

6.    Impress as many important people as possible.

7.    Get lots of pats on the back.

8.    Wait for success.

9.    And wait.

10. And wait.

11. Then repeat steps 8 through 10 some more. 

Sound familiar?

That’s the story of Failed Good Technology.

The story of horrible technology is one we can wrap our heads around but Failed Good Technology is harder to comprehend. 

Unless you take your technologist hat off.

Ok. Tech hat off.

So what’s wrong with that story?

As a tech guy it took a while to unpack and dismantle that story step by step but eventually I figured it out.

Everything is wrong with that story.

But for starters, let’s cut the crap out. Meaning, steps 5 through 11. We don't need that. We don't need the pats on the back. Unless they come from customers. We don't need to impress anyone, unless it's the customer. Forget the pitches, unless it helps with customer development.

So that gives us four remaining steps. Let’s look at step 4.

Try to find a way to explain how great your technology is.

No one cares about technology. No, I mean literally no one cares, other than technologists. People care about solving a problem, going through an experiences, going places, seeing things, talking to people, etc. Technology is least of their worries, unless it shines and it’s pretty. But then it’s not technology anymore, it’s fashion. So, yeah, technology is still an afterthought.

And as we did take off our Tech hats off, we can scratch #4 off the list as well.

How about #3? Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe that’s why this story leads to ultimate failure.

Make the technology as great as possible. 

But wait. We just said that no one cares about technology. So that means no cares about any kind of technology. Whether great or not so great. Let’s be honest with ourselves here and concede that we so don’t care about technology that even if it’s great, we still could care less. Ok, another bites the dust.

Two to go. Let’s keep going backwards and look at #2.

Build technology around the original idea.

I could easily dismiss this based on the same core principle that no one cares about technology but let’s actually go even further with this one. Technology is not built around an idea. Even less, the original idea. Technology has nothing to do with ideas. Ideas are important and necessary for building technology but building technology around an idea – is usually a bad idea.

And if that’s not confusing enough, the original idea is worthless. Everyone can have ideas. No big deal about that. Building technology around an idea is absolutely worthless because the idea is worthless so anything built around it shares the same worthlessness.

So that leaves us with #1.

Get an idea.

Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe products fail because of lack of creativity. If people would get more ideas, maybe more products would succeed.

But that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Because there’s a lot of creative people in the world and a lot of those people work on failed products. They get tons of ideas and their products still fail. 

If there’s one thing I’ll never complain about is my creative throughput. If you put a gun to my head or just give me a few minutes of silence, either one, I am able to generate a ridiculous amount of ideas in a relatively short amount of time.

But so what. I still used that same brain to work on products that ultimately failed.

So much for that story. We absolutely dismantled it, step by step, and like I said, Everything is wrong with it.

What’s the real story?

What’s the success story? What does that look like?

I’ve spent years thinking about that and after living The Failure Story so many times I do believe I have finally dismantled it, unpacked it and analysed it enough to be able to start asking the right questions and work on the other story. The Success Story.

That’s for another post because this one’s getting too long, but I’ll close with this one question that I believe is the #1 question to ask when building The Success Story for your product.

Who is The Customer? 

Next time, I’ll go through what that means and I’ll make a case for The Success Story as I see it.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, especially if you lived (and survived) through Your Failure Story.