What makes a product successful?

Zurb has a new beta product called Tavern that asks a design-related question everyday to the community. It's in closed beta right now, but there's a good question for today and I wanted to publically share my answer here as well.

The question

What makes a product successful?

My answer

There are a lot of things that make a product successful. I’m sure most people will tell you that it, “has to solve a problem”. That’s absolutely true, but beyond the standard answers like that and “providing a good user experience”, you need to have great drive (as a person) to push a product forward - without that you’ll have nothing more than a stale user base and experience inside of a couple months.

More stock also needs to be put into using the psychological concepts behind exclusivity and creating random reward/feedback systems. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with creating experiences based on that rather than interfaces as the primary point of experience (to varying success). There’s a lot of good & ignored research available about this (I’ll dig it up and come back).

In the classic business sense there are 2 ways to make money (if that’s how you’re gauging success):

  • Sell a lot of products for low cost (high turnover - Walmart & the App store does this)
  • Sell less products for a high cost (high margin - luxury brands typically do this)

Our current model for success is collecting as many users/customers as possible and profiting on micro-transactions that people don't generally care about (Netflix “set it and forget it” billing, $0.99 apps, etc.). Basically the opposite of exclusivity. “Everyone come in and give me small amounts of money and forget to turn it off!” Then we can show off a large/impressive number when we talk about our user base (hit counters!).

There’s a reason everyone wants to be part of a beta (betas are rare nowadays in favor of MVP - I think this is a mistake; there can be a balance), but there’s a ton of value in maintaining a level of exclusivity in your product. If it’s worth it, people will pay a premium. When it comes down to it it’s more efficient to gain (and retain) 1 user who is willing to pay $100 vs. 100 users willing to pay $1, because of the perceived value in the product.

You’ll end up with more engaged users in the end.