"Nice to have" vs. "Need to have"

A new lens

The nightmare-fuel question: “Are we building a ‘nice-to-have’ or a ‘need-to-have’ product?”

I’ve been thinking about this topic for years… and finally feel like the pieces came together in my head after reading The Heart of Innovation this week.¹

Why “nice-to-have” ruins everything

Here’s why this nice-to-have vs. need-to-have concept matters.

If we think our product is - or might be - a nice-to-have, then we think it’s our job to PERSUADE customers that they should buy, that they should renew, or that they SHOULD think of it as a need-to-have.

The more time I spend bringing companies 0-1, the more I realize that persuasion is the enemy of product-market fit.

Now, I’m not saying persuasion doesn’t work at all. That’s the problem: It can work. We can get to 10s or 100s of customers this way.

But relying on persuasion prevents us from finding organic pull or real demand. And we wind up building a product that ONLY sells IF we force it. This creates a million different downstream problems in our businesses.

We need to stop persuading. But to do that, we need to kill the fear that our product might be a nice-to-have product. And to do THAT… we need a new way to think about what need-to-have means.

A new lens

Imagine that everybody has a to-do list in their brain that’s a 100% accurate reflection of their tasks, projects, and priorities. At any one point in time, they can only prioritize ONE thing off their to-do list’s infinite backlog. And if our product fits into that ONE thing they’re prioritizing better than their alternatives… they’ll buy.

So then, “need-to-have” seems situational:

• In what situation would it be strange if they DIDN’T prioritize this one task/project, out of the million things on their backlog?

• Given the alternative approaches they consider to this project, what would we have to supply so that it would be weird if they DIDN’T choose us?

This = where, when, and for whom your product is a need-to-have. No pushing, persuading, or convincing needed. When you find this, customers tend to pull the whole product into existence… and help you start to answer all the other nightmare-fuel questions too.

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1. Shoutout to Cedric Chin at CommonCog (among others) for the book recommendation. The Heart of Innovation is one of the rare business books that’s actually worth reading. Yes, despite having a title that sounds like it’s an insufferable VC memoir. (It isn’t.)