Deeper or wider

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/deeper-or-wider.html

by peter123 • 17 years ago

30 11 17 years ago

sethgodin.typepad.com

i thought we were supposed to avoid feature creep seth. shouldn't we avoid brown rice if it isn't part of our core competency? aren't we diluting the brand?

this is the problem I have with posts like this, they reduce to not very useful rules of thumb and often wind up contradicting each other.

cubedice• 17 years ago

Sort of like French proverbs or Zen koans, I suppose. The fact that they are often too general and contradictory doesn't seem to stop older, wiser folk from repeating them.

diN0bot• 17 years ago

IMHO, this just demonstrates the extent of fluff that is the blog piece.

callmeed• 17 years ago

I feel like Godin is going deeper–focusing on gullible startup founders who think he's saying something revolutionary because he wraps it in a catch-phrase like "buffet dilemma"

Its called vertical/niche market vs. horizontal market. Pick one, build a great product, and provide great service. Nuff said.

omouse• 17 years ago

Indeed, and it would be better if everyone just read Peter Drucker's Innovation & Entrepreneurship: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0887306187/squeakland...

edw519• 17 years ago

"So, there are two ways to go. Much deeper, or a bit wider."

Ah, there's only one way to go. Whatever the market is telling you. If you're not listening to that, all the little hacks in the world won't help you.

pxlpshr• 17 years ago

Market makers would likely disagree with you, but I digress... so very, very few startups ever reach that level. :)

billswift• 17 years ago

Market makers frequently do neither, they often go off on some tangent that satisfies desires no one had realized existed before. As long as people are recommending books, Clayton's "Innovator's Dilemma" is interesting and fairly useful (the sequels much less so).

10ren2• 17 years ago

He's talking about a very special case were a group of people need to agree to buy your product (that is, where everyone has "veto power"); but it's not acceptable to one of them.

He says one way is to make the product acceptable to more people - ensure it has something that each of them wants ("a bit wider"). Another way is to make it so compellingly wonderful for one particular person that they will "bully" their colleagues into getting it ("much deeper").

I'm not sure how applicable this is to software. Often, it's just one party that needs to be satisfied. But... it can also be an organizational purchase, where the users have to be happy, the tech support guys have to be happy, accounting has to be happy, management has to be happy, etc. Each party has sufficient power to veto a purchase (this isn't always the case!). Seth is saying you can sweeten the deal slightly, to try to please the hold-outs a little more (just one of: easier to use, easier to support, easier to pay for, easier to justify ROI). Or, the other approach, is to make one attribute so astoundingly amazingly good, that it's so far more than "acceptable" to one party that you galvanize them into action, to champion your product, calling in favours, making sacrifices, doing deals to get the other players to agree (like a senate, right).

He didn't say this, but I think he's implying it's easier to identify the hold-outs and just please them enough for the purchase to be unenthusiastically acceptable to them (Oh well, I guess we can get it), instead of exciting one party so much that they move heaven and earth for you.

I reiterate that the starting point is the very special case where several people have veto power, and the product is not acceptable to one of them.

SwellJoe• 17 years ago

I suspect that to build a very large software business you have to build a product that can be agreed on by a consensus of people in a company (it may not be a huge decision-making group, but it does take a couple of people signing off on most major decisions). I'm having a hard time coming up with any software product that would be explosively successful without a group of people being able to agree on it. Office software, CRM, anything on the server, chat or other interactive tool, pretty much anything someone would pay for, would likely be chosen more often if the people that person works with or communicates with also choose the product.

Even games, these days, are often decided on because people can play with their friends or at least share and trade games amongst their social circle.

Actually, it just struck me how much less solitary computing is than it was even five or ten years ago. So much of what we do now is interacting with and sharing with others. Funny how that snuck up on me.

10ren2• 17 years ago

Some of these factors are network effects. I conjecture that every product has some kind of network effect; it's a question of degree. A telephone 100% network effect; a USB drive might seem to have no network effects, but most people are biased towards the most popular one.

I think your criteria of "explosively successful" might require very strong network effects - it certainly requires some way to reach lots of people, and network effects are one way of doing so (the de.li.ci.ous guy mentioned 3 needed factors, and this was one - he also put a new-to-me twist on it. I'll try to find the post). If you relax it to modest, steady growth, it might not require strong network effects (and possibly might be more stable - because resistant to explosively growing competitors...).

Deeper or wider

Related Stories