One Killer Use Case

I made many mistakes in my companies, including Fibery. The one mistake I want to discuss here was especially painful, costly and dumb. Fortunately, it is fixable.

Here is the mistake:?

Fibery does not have a single killer use case.

I started Fibery to build an ultimate solution for the whole company, to run many processes in a single tool, replace many other tools, connect work and knowledge together. While this is a nice shiny vision I believe in, I did not select a single killer use case for a company to start with in Fibery. ?

All-in-one solution for many processes is not a use case, it is an evolution and a side-effect of many narrow connected use cases. As a result of this mistake, we focused on a platform, technology and horizontality. This is OK, but at some point (very early), we had to map these things to a single deep killer use case. Well, we didn’t till the last year.?

What are the consequences of this mistake?

• It is hard to explain the problem you are solving. Connecting processes, all-in-one tool, connecting work and knowledge —?all these things are quite abstract and hard to map to company problems.
• It is hard to land in a company. When you support many use cases on some average level and don't have a killer use case, it is hard for any company to select your product. Usually a company solves one problem at a time: "We need to interact with customers, let's use Intercom", "We have to plan and track our dev team work, let's use Linear", "We want to brainstorm things as a remote team, let's use Miro". The result is many disconnected tools, but a company does not perceive this as a problem.
• Product is hard to build. When you are targeting many use cases, you have to implement many features. It takes time and resources, so your growth will be slow. Eventually it may pay off, but you need huge investments and a large team to not die early and young.

Narrow vs. Wide products strategies

When you build a narrow, focused product that does only one thing great, you don’t have this problem, you already have your killer use case. This is why smaller and very focused products are easier to build and sell. One use case → one message.?

When you build something that can support several use cases, you have to choose one to focus on and support it exceptionally well.

Here are my advices to myself and to other product folks who struggle with wide products:

• have a long term vision with many use cases and always keep it in mind, but still focus on a single use case first.
• as soon as you discover that your product does not have a single killer use case, stop working. Think deep. And select the one use case you will be focusing on. In the worst scenario select two tightly connected use cases.
• keep focusing on the killer use case till it becomes the one. Release it, collect feedback, polish it, iterate.

Here is the portrait of a wide product done right:

Successes and failures

Let's briefly check some cases.

?? Intercom is a very good example. They started as a chat that focuses on customer success. Very clear use case, easy to understand and easy to sell if done well. They did it well.

Then they started to add more use cases, like user guides, messages, onboarding flows, etc. Some of these use cases were implemented poorly (user guides), some were implemented good enough (messages), but the core use case attracted new customers, retained old customers and enabled upsell.

?? Notion is another good example. They started as a website builder, failed, and focused on notes taking and wiki, so they competed with with Evernote initially and won due to great execution, design and vision. Then Notion expanded to teams, work management use cases, project management, company wiki, etc. Notion is a very horizontal product now, but still the focused on a single use case and did it well.

?? Coda is looking like a failure to me (so far). They are very horizontal and have no killer use case. Coda works bad as a wiki, relatively poor as a work management tool, etc. I see no single killer use case in Coda. Better spreadsheet that Google? But here you have Airtable that works much better for this use case. Better Google Docs? Maybe, but this is relatively abstract, complex and hard to sell (Google Docs are free). Custom apps? Here I think Coda has some better chances, but this is still very wide range and not a single killer use case. Still hard to sell.

Conclusion

Conclusion is short — Focus on a single killer use case.