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Aug 3, 2015 34 min

Creating The Next Killer App – On Budget!

from Build a Better Startup Interviews Hosted by Mark Asquith talks about app development in small business & startups

It seems that almost every day we hear of the next killer app, a system or service that will revolutionise our lives and businesses. But for every Uber or Evernote, there are hundreds of others that fell by the wayside and failed to make the desired impact. If we have an idea that we think… The post Creating The Next Killer App – On Budget! appeared first on Excellence Expected, by Mark Asquith.

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It seems that almost every day we hear of the next killer app, a system or service that will revolutionise our lives and businesses. But for every Uber or Evernote, there are hundreds of others that fell by the wayside and failed to make the desired impact. If we have an idea that we think can improve how we live and do business, how can we pursue that idea without falling victim to the same pitfalls as so many others? Our guest in this episode is Rawnet’s Adam Smith, someone who knows a great deal about creating successful products in the digital realm. With a track record for building innovative businesses, Adam knows how to make a success of those lightbulb ideas. Perhaps more importantly, he knows what to avoid. During a product’s development we often hear of scope creep, when the primary goals of the products are expanded and expanded until the final product bears little resemblance to the original idea. In a similar vein, software and mobile apps can fall into development hell, where too many stakeholders with too many competing ideas can end up delaying or sinking a very promising concept. The more that a product suffers from delays or a lack of focus, the more expensive its development will be and the most costly its potential failure. When then, as small business owners, should we take the steps to create our own digital products? And what parameters should be set before embarking on such a project? How should we decide which are the essential features? Listen to this episode of your favourite small business podcast to gain some powerful insights on this topic from a renowned expert in the field. Issue Challenged in this Small Business Podcast Episode: How do we know which digital products are right for our businesses? And how can we stop spending too much on the wrong ones? About Adam: Adam Smith is the founder and Managing Director of Rawnet, a multi-award winning digital web agency that specialises in mobile development, web app development and conversion optimization. The company also works on behalf of clients to handle all other aspects of their digital strategies. Adam has been innovating in the digital space since the late ‘90s and prior to the founding Rawnet, he also created the world’s most successful white label online dating application, whitelabeldating.com. Adam Actionable Tips: * Work out feature ROIs. Each feature has a development cost and each feature that’s added can dilute the original concept. Therefore, every feature needs to pay for itself. Is this going to get any more sign ups? And is this a feature something that the end user needs or is it a merely a ‘nice-to-have’? * Keep the proposition simple. Can you explain the product in one sentence? What’s the one thing that is does very well? If it takes you more than 30 seconds to explain, the idea is too broad and you won’t be able to market it. A nice, simple message is needed to get the attention of clients. Consumers are pulled in so many directions. If something is too complicated, they won’t spend the time looking into it. * Be prepared to pivot. You need to be prepared to pivot, but also wary of not becoming like a headless chicken, darting in different directions at high speeds. Don’t be afraid to change tack, but learn from the user feedback and move in a direction that will help grow the business. Letting go of the original idea can be tough, but sometimes tough love is needed for success in business. Top Quotes: * “We couldn’t afford to think big picture. It was our own money so we needed to be lean.” * “We’ve seen stuff that hasn’t worked so well, we’ve seen stuff flop and we’ve seen stuff explode in terms of success way beyond what any of us could have imagined.” * “If you try and be all things to all men,

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Creating The Next Killer App – On Budget!

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Excellent, Excellency expected. The inspirational business advice podcast. Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Excellency expected with me, Mark Asquith. Now, today we've got quite an interesting issue that we're going to challenge.

And it's something I actually fall prey to myself quite frequently. I'm kind of like a mic pipe. I see something shining. I kind of like to play with it and I want to have a look at it.

And that's all well and good. But if you're a small business owner, the problem is that there are so many digital products out there. How do you know what's right for you and how can you stop spending too much on the wrong digital products for your business? And that's the issue that we're going to challenge today.

And helping me do that is a real, real expert in anything digital. Someone that's been working in digital industry for over 16 years, specifically in media and digital design. So it gives me great pleasure to welcome to show Mr. Adam Smith from Ronnet.

Hey Mark, hey Dave. I'm good. Thank you. So how are you?

Yeah, it's your first. What's your name? Thank you. Excellent stuff.

So before we dig into this, Adam, I think quite a lot of people have heard of Ronnet here in the UK. But for our US listeners and our global listeners, let's dig into your background, please. So what do you do and where did you come from? Sure.

OK, so I'm the MD at Ronnet. So we're a digital agency. So we would create products and obviously, obviously, best of all, to product ourselves, as well as how our business and how our clients. But in terms of background, I've actually come from a product background before embarking on the agency.

So I think that gives me quite a nice view of having been a client, but also being the advising agency as well. For people looking to maybe design their own products or create something new for the market. So I guess it all started when, well, I never quite decided whether I was a creative or a technical guy. I've always walked straight down the middle of the tube.

I guess that kind of ended itself to not really knowing. Because I was a pretty naff designer and I wasn't that good a coder. It was kind of a bit of everything. It was kind of then let me down the walk to commercial path.

I'm not really excited about it. I'm not actually that skillful either when it comes to actually building it myself. But we used to really get excited about products and how to make money online. I guess this would have been even 15 years ago now.

So we would be making websites and applications for clients. And we'd always look at it and go, there's better ways to do this. You're just investing way too much on this. You've thought of way too many things.

I can't see this working. But obviously, as a small business, you go along with it. And so the clients sometimes, they're just so out of what they want to do. They just go ahead and create it anyway.

So we had a lot of experience of people coming to us with their ideas. But also, more and more, we then decided to develop our own products. We thought, well, how do we prove that we know what we're talking about? We're going to need to have some sort of through-points out in the markets.

We've decided ourselves. So we started off sort of emulating a few business ideas that might be coming through. So I think the first one we started with, which is now an ultimately in-pound dating application. This is one of the first ones we did, sort of in-house, as a business.

And the other one is just an online dating application. But it was more of a work-level platform. So brands would come in and take care of the marketing. We built a bit of the tech behind it.

So that kind of taught us, because it was our own credit cards, that kind of taught us how to be super lean, when putting it together. We couldn't afford to be thinking big picture. We couldn't afford to take on big guys. So I guess just in terms of knowing it's your own money, knowing it's what you're, you know, it's down to you where it works.

You're not going to start spending too much as much as you can. That kind of has stayed with me all these years on. I think it's something that we like to bring to clients. So based on all that business, maybe five or six years ago, to then focus solely on the agency itself.

But also to always keep a handle on all the good ideas that come up. And I guess the second one we've sort of created launched is a virtual jubox application. This is really for, so a lot of sort of pubs already sort of open. Anyway, you're going to be playing music really just to kind of redefine how the jubox can work in a digital environment, selecting to change from your phone, it was a nice marketing application.

But again, we learned a lot when developing that ourselves. If we had to market it, we had to go out to find partners to distribute it, as well as design it and build for the product anyway. So it's really nice to get a full view of everything that it takes to make something successful. I guess as I've, you know, I've got those two businesses under my belt, and then now I'm purely focusing on the agency itself.

And what we do is we have other clients who have their ideas. So we're thinking about investing in a product, whether it be for their own internal use or something that they want to push out themselves, or they're looking to get into the market, or be the next, you know, dot com success, then that's where we would come in trying to help them, just to guide them through creating that. And obviously we've learned a lot along the way. We've seen stuff that hasn't worked so well.

We've seen stuff flop. We've seen stuff explode in terms of success way beyond what any of us would have imagined. So yeah, I think that's a kind of nice, nice way of sharing in terms of just always seeing it for both the inside and outside, in creating digital projects. It's a really interesting time that we're living out.

That's what I mentioned at the beginning, and again, I mentioned that I kind of fall prey to this. It's something new and shiny. One, you want to try it as a consumer, and two, if you've got a business, you kind of want to follow a suit a lot of the time with this kind of thing. Do you guys get many people coming in and saying, okay, I've seen X, Y, Z over there doing this.

Can we just do that? You know, do they tend to try and back on to things? Yeah, so lots of it would be, yeah, say like a me too, right here, where they've seen something working and they might have come up with an each or a slight tactic market or a slight tactic audience to then come up with what would be a new product. But obviously there's a bit of an education phase in terms of well, you do realize these guys spend a lot of time getting to where they go to, and there's a reason that it works.

So just need to be sure that the kind of the angle that they're taking with this kind of fresh approach, which is need to ensure that that's good enough to make it stand out. Otherwise it's just gonna be a need to and not really have a good interaction. I think that's a really interesting point. And just to kind of turn it on its head as well, I think if you're a small business owner, or if you're specifically looking over the fence and saying, well actually, I can probably niche this down a little bit further as you said, with a different marketing tact for my version of this kind of software, what is your advice to people who actually see that and do the other thing, which is get this happen because someone is already doing, is there any positive advice that you can give on that?

Yeah, so they may be using the system, but something about it isn't quite right. So this is, they might be thinking, this is a two step effort for what I need. It's, let's say for example, it's a CRM. So this does everything it looks after, all of my contacts are telling me to call it, that that's going to know, track my pipeline, but maybe it doesn't do this particular small thing that would make it a killer app for me.

So that could be maybe multi-ultimization, which could be a separate product. And I think what a lot of companies do, they have five or six systems really loosely joined together and in their own processes in sort of human time, that goes into making them all work as a killer app. So the next step from that stage is to go, actually, well, while I'm using five or six different systems to kind of do what I pass one, when I could take some time to think about, well, if I could get a map that does everything I need, then surely that's just going to be successful and clean up the market. So that's the positive because that's, you're scratching your own itch, you've seen a problem, you've identified it and you're willing to test that to market.

But obviously what you need to be careful of is every, everybody works like differently. If you try to be, if you try to be all things format, then again, it's going to flop. So it's just the case of being focused and making sure that whatever new entry you are taking on this product, there's still a strong focus on that and it's still quite, these are what's all the needs of the fine proposition of what that product's going to be. I think that focus is really important.

I think that's something that will probably end up touching on later. I'd just like to dig a bit further into, I guess the reasons that people would actually commission a digital piece of software, a digital product, digital project, because we do live in this world of software as a service, we live in this world of really quick access to really high quality products that are actually really, really cheap, especially for small business. And at what point does it become valuable to start talking about doing this ourselves? Is that when you find an app that does 80% of what you want and only 20% you need to add to it?

Are there other reasons to that, the business case, reasons, budget reasons, what's the general gist behind that? Well, it's kind of 50, so half are looking to fix their own problem and they feel that there's a bit of a picture to look at in terms of, well, if we're investing in something to do this, why not make it products, why not? See if we can make it pay for itself, why are you pushing it out there to other businesses? But sometimes it could be completely random, it could be, it could have just bubbled up from a conversation in a pub.

I mean, pretty much every time I go out on meet with friends, the topics on the new concept, I guess I've got the same app I did, what do you think? And that's, I don't know if that's just my set of friends or because they know that I know a little bit about it. But I'd imagine these conversations happen a lot because Mondays and Tuesdays we get a lot of inbound inquiries for, I've got this idea wouldn't be great if X, Y, Z, and you know it's just, they're kind of reaching out a bit too early, they've got a really loose idea. But again, that's where it comes from.

It's just conversations and you can be with set of friends and you can all agree, actually, I think we've come on to something here. Let's push this forward and see if it's viable. What I like about that is that it can be a conversation with friends that turned into a very, very viable business, just to turn that idea around that, okay, this might be a loose idea right now, but if you're confident in that, you can actually pursue it relatively low cost now and you can start to firm things up into something a little bit more fixed if you like, in terms of what the product does with very, very little investment and I guess come to someone like yourself to say, well look, here's a very firm idea. Now what can we do next?

And what, if someone has this firm idea, so they've gone through this process of saying, well, you know, I've kind of think it might solve this kind of problem. When they've gone through that, when they've firm it up, what are the next stages from your perspective? How do you actually make your other as viable with people? Yeah, so that's where the point.

As tempting as it is just to jump in and start zoning it, because that's obviously the fun side. You do have to take a step back. So, we would sort of encourage people to, no, let's all take a step back. Let's boil down what it is, you've got this idea.

And sometimes it's a tricky conversation, because if it's your idea, you've got such passion for it. You can be a little blind, it's too advice or to the dangers or to the negatives, but you just have to take these people through this process. So we run workshops where they essentially guess the slice of the agency. So rather than just talking to me, you might have a few ideas, it'd be, okay, well, let's get a US line, let's get a marketing line, let's get some people with sort of the design experience who can be thinking more about the UX.

Let's all get together and run that workshop and work out exactly what it needs to be. And the kind of output of that is essentially the perfect brief. So they would come with maybe a kind of fuzzy brief. I've got this idea, I think it can work.

I believe there's a market for it. I've got my marketing strategy lined up. So let's go, let's go, and they're really excited and they just can't wait to start. But the danger is just starting without yet defining it too much.

We do like to spend that time upfront in just creating that alternate brief. That's just like, sanity checking pretty much every end of the world. It's taking features out as well, which just sounds weird. Obviously we would sort of be like, sounds on the size of the project, but there's no point building a big project if it's gonna flop.

So you just really try to work out, okay, well, let's boil this down, because at the moment, you've all got very excited, we've chucked so many of these features. But if we try to explain what this is to somebody, they're not gonna get it. So is it an app to save some time, or is it an app to drive more sales? For example, if you try to put that to market, then the audience just won't be able to grasp because they won't understand what it is.

So you have to go super simple. As much as it'd be great if they did both things, what's the most unique aspect about this app? Well, actually, no, it's the real core killer feature of this application so it saves time. The fact that it drives more sales, we can work on that later once we've got a user base.

But let's make this a nice, concise, clear message. It's something that's gonna be far more easier to market. And it's something we can test for a lot less cost in terms of development time and testing time. So it's just a case of boiling it down and working out what does your first version look like?

But obviously you've got the red maps to sort of keep them engaged, but you do need to bottom out what version quite fairly quickly. Otherwise, it's gonna suffer a scope creep. And before you know it, you've made this big monster app that does lots of things but not very well. Whereas what you really try and do is say, well, it does this one thing and it does it perfectly and it's flawless.

They're the episode and they'll obviously be successful. If you think about all this, all the real kind of success to is that around there, they're not killer apps, they're not fixed everything apps. They do one thing really, really well. And yeah, that could have all started just as easily as an idea in a part of a world that could have had a little bit of it's exit around the table for days and days.

But generally, they're the ones that are successful, the ones that fix a problem, a very real problem and it fixes it well. Yeah, I completely agree with that. And as you said, they're not all the killer apps but sometimes they're the apps or the piece of software that if you were to remove them, you'd really feel the impact because the problem that it solves would just be steamrolling back into your life. So I get the idea right, it's not always the killer app.

So I think that's really, really valuable. That gets just moving through the process. And we can ascertain from the developmental process, the ideas process that if you can create a successful app, yes, of course, you can make money with it. And when we say, of course, we don't just mean a mobile app for those guys listening out.

It can be anything online, it can be digital pieces of software that runs in a browser, it can be anything that solves a problem using online software. So we get through this process, we know it can solve our problems, we know we can perhaps make money from it. Let's just spin that around again. What happens if we get this wrong?

What happens if we do cram two when it features? And I'll develop something that no one wants. What can be the downsides and what are the options when something like that happens? Yeah, so the downsides, so very quickly, you'll work out if it's not quite guess and attraction you are expecting.

So you might have a massive marketing campaign and either people just aren't signing up because they don't get it or it's getting high signup rates and people don't get it and experimenting with the app, but they're just not coming back. So but that's not necessarily not all doom and gloom because what you're getting there is gold dust in terms of feedback on your idea. And as long as you were sensible in the development phase, to begin with, hopefully you've not invested everything all in this one big thing so far. You've gone to market and you've been sensible about that investment.

And the best case way to look at that is well, it's out there but now we're getting wheel feedback. So we're finding that everybody's trying to do XYZ, but they're struggling or nobody's looking at this feature. And then that's when it's totally fine to go back and re-group and rethink about what you're asking me. And as long as you're not completely reinventing the wheel, because otherwise you might as well just ask again, but you're kind of tweaking on the outside.

That's sort of pivoting. So you've still got one foot on the ground in terms of what the app stands for, but it does give you the kind of flexibility to change direction without starting completely again. And that's totally normal. I think there's a lot of products out there that were used in a completely different way to how they were initially conceived to be used.

But that's fine because you're now making something that is relevant to the users. Yeah, I think that's important to remember that it's all right to re-group. I think so many people, especially when it is, I was just about to say the word traditional app, and I can't believe I'm saying traditional and app in the same center. But if you imagine the traditional app idea, and you sort of take it through this process, having the idea in the pub and throwing it around on a Monday, Tuesday morning, trying to flesh it out over the next few weeks.

And if it doesn't work the first time, it's very easily, it's very easy to get distracted and say, well, this has just failed, this just didn't work. And what you're saying there, Adam, is that it's all right to come back and say, well, do you know what? It's not a failure, I such it just needs to shift a little bit. And how do you tend to find customers or clients or partners that you work with?

Are they quite pragmatic without, do they tend to hold onto that passion that they had early on? Does it become difficult to shift? It can become difficult, especially if someone's really setting their way, and they're adding from day one, this is gonna change the world. They will turn a blind eye to what the feedback says, and that's a real challenge.

So they're kind of, then fall back to us to try and articulate that or put that across in a way to say, that you've invested this much, where you're only gonna have to, these few tweaks are just worthless, just give it a go, let's make these changes, let's listen to this feedback, listen to concerns, because a lot of people like it for this. So why don't we just slightly put it in that direction? So I guess a really good example of that is that I mentioned earlier, there's a new box, this new box that's actually taken me a few years ago, and it's all around SMS requests, when you're sitting in a pub to obviously with the influencer playing around you. And that was the key idea, that's what we're meant to mark with.

But it was also a very good background music application, so the landlord should obviously choose, rather than a Spotify playlist, so just choosing sort of genres or times or decades, and setting a time, setting a time, not just schedule for that, and just putting it on and forgetting about it. So that was part of the jukebox system, but the background music side of things started is what people were using. And now we kind of turned down the jukebox side of what the application is, and now it's now a survival background music application that's used in shops, using restaurants, where users don't even get to choose what something are, but we kind of refocused in usage as a sort of background music application. Now we could have been really, really kind of stubborn and said, no, this is an amazing idea, it's all about the requests, it's all about the SMS, it's all about the jukebox.

Had we done that, we would have started our growth way more than what we've enjoyed. So it's just a case of just emitting itself, okay, we have an idea, it's good in this getting some traction, but what people really like is something that we would have never even forced up in a million years, that would be successful, but the market doesn't like, so let's concentrate on that. So the interesting thing there is that the app itself and the software, you know, the goal that it sets out to achieve is relatively similar to your original idea, but the use case has just changed. And did you change your marketing to suit that?

I know that sounds like a really obvious question, but I would imagine it can be sometimes difficult to get everything, all of your ducks in a row. Did you completely shift the focus of the marketing and everything that went with it? Yeah, we did exactly that. So we turned down, so rather than that, so the jukebox elements of it just became a kind of add-on feature if you want to, we're work shouting about it at all, because obviously it's still, I'll be interested in some.

So it's kind of, oh, that's a great thing to have, well, that's a nice little addition to the app, rather than this is what the app is. So yeah, but why is it a little bit of sort of rethinking in terms of how we're gonna market it, who are we talking to? Obviously, we were probably targeting breweries and pubs and anybody where people are like, if you're drinking and play music. But this opened us up to target retail chains, shopping malls, and there's, I just think anything really, so kind of completely changes your marketing, but that's fine.

And then we were okay with that, because we'd rather be a success then, be totally sort of committing some passion about what we first set out to do. And that's the real thing, you have to be flexible, you have to listen to what, what the public is saying otherwise, you will end up just wasting money and there's all probably money down the drain trying to get something to work, perhaps whatever work. Yeah, I think that's really important. And just to kind of move further down that marketing path and because marketing generally is never an overnight thing, especially when it comes to someone adopting a new piece of software, integrating a new piece of kit into their business or into their lives, do you find that, especially from the client side of things, or perhaps less so when you're building your own stuff, do the clients understand generally that this can be quite a long process?

So the first marketing campaign, the first push, the first round of even beta signups might not go as well as they think, how do you guys manage that expectation and sort of work people through that? So generally they've not thought about that step just yet, which is for me, it's a very good idea if I build it, it's gonna be successful. And you have to save some money for the marketing. You can't guarantee that it's gonna spread a lot while for you, you can't guarantee that the actual if it wasn't about that.

You're gonna pick this up, there's thousands of people releasing the stuff every single day, so you have to think of the marketing strategy. And I guess the tricky thing here is a lot of these, you're building something and if it's good and if it's unique, you're building something that people don't know exist. So they're never gonna search for an app that does X, Y, Z because they don't know it's out there. And you can't rely on people knowing that they have that problem to be fixed.

So there's a lot you have to consider in terms of getting out there, especially sort of around beta applications where you have to prove to the company wherever you're talking to, I know you've got a problem. We've put a lot of research into fixing that and it could be trials could be demos. And then a lot of work that also needs to go into the actual website itself and then you need to have a whole kind of target, the targeting strategy, traffic strategy, kind of demoing and sign up and maybe guest pass kind of approach to it before they actually sign up to some use of the app. So, but they've very rarely got that far and maybe there is a sort of touch of my ability around it whereas well obviously this is a good idea, it must be successful.

I don't really need to worry about marketing, that's totally common. I think there's an interesting, well, I'll rephrase that. I've rephrase it into a question actually. Do you think the super successful apps that we see that are out there, they're solving B2B problems, you know the trailers of the world, the Evernote, the drop boxes and then things that are B2C oriented like the Ubers and the Airbnbs of the world, which are these super successful stories.

Do you think that sometimes leads to this slightly jaded expectation on the app store or a new piece of software will just instantly be a success? Has that made things more difficult from a realistic perspective? Yes, absolutely, because the papers are full of successes and people are always seeing IPOs, Desi's apps out from Ocing and they just see the dollar signs and I get to exchange it but a lot of work is going on here. So, nothing happens overnight and nothing happens no one has a lot of super, sort of shoestring budgets.

So, I think there is the kind of expectation out there that building a good app to make you instantly rich. I think that's, people can get kind of short-sighted by that. And it's just like any other business that stands in touch or actually need to build momentum, you need to build a set of users that love your product. It's not gonna happen quickly.

Now, that's a faster process with B2C because you're more likely to reap your water, world of mouth and et cetera. And you've obviously used PR and talked to a lot more people but in B2B, that's not really a thing you kind of have to approach people separately. So, it's a lot longer process. Every sale is going to take human time.

You can't automate the B2B sale that easily unless it's a two-season product. Whereas obviously, you can't have a large-fare any sales time into a B2C, but you want people to sign up and start using it 100% of all the whole class again. That's really interesting. And especially distinction between the software and it being a digital product and a very key word that you mention in there, which is a business because those inquiries that land on your desk and on Monday and Tuesday after the ideas in the Pope, do people generally believe that they're starting a business with this?

And that's a question that I don't know if even they would know the answer to. They don't. So, obviously a lot of these are qualified out very quickly. But occasionally, then there's something cancelled to be more about it.

They've got the money back it out there. They've got the time they're determined to put the F3 into it. And then the ones that we've thought it's so out of all the inquiries, there's probably only five percent we go to a meeting. So we get a lot of, obviously, the first thing you type in is app developer.

So a lot of it's gonna be unqualified anyway. The one you get to say is where you've got people, could be businesses or somebody who's willing to put the effort in to make this work. And obviously the other ones we pursue and we can get something else with it at the end. Love it.

Fantastic. We've framed that really, really nice. And I think we've covered a heck of the entire process there from the ideas right through to trying to get this thing to market that people wanting to create. So what I'd like to do now, sir, is move into the excellence, the excellence expected even.

I'll just put my teeth in this morning. Excellence expected actionable tips sections. I know you've been busy putting together three actionable tips for people looking to create a digital product that they can take to market. So sir, what is the first actionable tip?

Sure. Okay. So the first one is workout feature ROIs, which, so that's just, again, this is something that we would look to the beginning of the project. So that's the age feature that you're developing, your age has got a cost in terms of doing it.

But it's also, every feature's gonna dilute your, it's got a sort of dilute factor as well in terms of what product it is. So we have to be careful about what features actually make it. So every feature needs to pay for itself. And this is, again, you go through the same danger of just trying to do everything at once because you're so excited about what the product has to do.

And there could be a feature on it. So wouldn't it be nice if, one last time for this thing, it comes up with a load of suggestions to do X, one set. And that's cool, but that's quite heavy AI. That's gonna cost 50% of development time just to do that.

And then the user size, that's a nice to have. That's not a must have feature. So let's screw that one out for now. And you basically do that for all the features.

How much is it gonna cost in terms of development? How much is it gonna cost in terms of dilute in the products? And then work out whether it's something that user needs, or is it nice to have that they're not that fuss about. And I think where things go wrong is we try to cram too many nice to have in there, dilute the brands.

And your number one product, which we don't know is gonna be a success or not, is it has cost too much to make because it does everything. So it's just the case of working up per feature. Is this gonna get any extra sign up? So is this gonna increase the conversion when they're reading what the benefits of the software is?

Or is it just a nice app that they're in different now? So yeah, it's just the case of looking each feature and pointing it down individually whether it's worth issuing or nots. I think that's really important. And it's difficult sometimes to see that as a genuine business decision as well because I would imagine people do get bogged down with ideas because you mentioned right at the beginning about having these briefing sessions and getting everyone together in a room.

And when you've got this melting pot of creativity and the ability to actually put things together and see the value in them, it can be quite tough to pull out the things that aren't gonna return anything. So I think that's a really, really, really valuable point. And let's dig into the second actionable tip please. So to the answer, this one is keep the proposition simple.

So this kind of ties into the first one, but this is kind of more, is far more important for the marketing of your products. So again, it's kind of explaining it within a sentence. So obviously, think of all the popular, if you think of like Uber, Airbnb, Tinder, anything that's held massive success recently, you can explain exactly what it does, the one thing that it does really, really well. And they've stuck to that and that's the reason for their success.

So if you're trying to explain what your app does and it's taking you more than 30 seconds because it's so big, then that's, you can't mark it that. People just aren't gonna get their heads around it. So again, let's keep finding one thing that you want to sort of focus on and that's your proposition. And that's a simple proposition, it's so marketable because people get it, you can cram it into an advert exactly what it's gonna help somebody.

And it's not over-concasing because people don't, people don't have to think about your products. They don't know you anytime at all to consider whether it's worth the tomorrow. So you have to kind of buy that time from them. You have to earn their head space to consider your products and the first place.

Anyway, to do that is a nice, simple message of what it is your product does in order to engage them to sort of hit it further. Yeah, and that feel that that's probably something that is an attention thing as well because the consumers, especially in B2C market, consumers are pulling so many directions, so many different types of offer every single day that if it's not simple. I guess they just won't spend the time looking into it. So again, I think that's a fantastic, fantastic point.

And the third and final action will tip, please, sir. It's the third one, which I feel I've already given away, but it's a be prepared pivot, hugely important. So that's, it's also, it's understanding the difference between pivoting and being head-to-stick and running around to not being able to do it. So pivoting is totally fine because in the example of it earlier, it was the same technology, it's the same app.

It didn't require a massive re-weight to change the entire sort of direction of the product. So it was relatively cheap, if that makes sense. So it's just a case of understanding what that means. So having, you know, what your account in terms or what your product is, but don't be afraid to change direction.

That's so, so important. We see so many people. I think it was, I think it was, it was a drop box I was reading about maybe two or three weeks ago about the first time they applied to Y Combinator and then just didn't get in and came out the second time was something that was just different enough. They pivoted just enough to be really, really valuable to people.

And I think that's such an important lesson to learn that it's not necessarily a failure if you have to change. And it's just, as you said, we did talk about earlier, but the idea that you've got to let go with some of that passion, if you can see that thing's aren't quite right. So I think that's so important. I think actually any level of business, whether it's digital or not.

Exactly. I think that care of the passion. It's tough to be, especially if you're talking to really excitable people that believe it's correct. And you don't want to always be the bad guy that's saying that let's rethink about this.

Let's re-brew. But sometimes it's tough, that's what it needs to get something successful. I love that. That's fantastic.

Well, that's really, really good. Adam, thank you so much. That's been a really, really solid episode. Really enjoyed that.

And that's absolutely packed full of value. So before we wrap it up, sir, can you just tell the listeners where they can find you online, please? Indeed. So the agency's RawNet.com, or just Twitter is RawNet hashtag.

Supercell, thank you so much Adam. Okay, thank you. That's all. My real pleasure.

And guys, for you listening out there, don't forget everything that myself and Adam have spoken about today will be available at excellence-expected.com. Where you can also pick up your free copy of the essential 14-day guide to cutting your work hours and increasing your impact. Until next time, thank you ever so much for listening. And don't forget, the more you expect from yourself, the more you will excel.

Bye bye.

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