Market, Marketing, Aesthetics, then Functionality

After reviewing our Trello board of app ideas that we've been collecting for the past several years, we settled on making an app to remember names.  After half a day of beginning to code, like all good programmers do, Russ said that we might want to take a different approach.  He read a quote from "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup" by Rob Walling:

Market Comes First, Marketing Second, Aesthetics Third, and Functionality a Distant Fourth

The product with a sizeable market and low competition wins even with bad marketing, a bad aesthetic, and poor functionality. Think Quickbooks in the early days, or any niche product you've ever seen that looked like it was written by a six year old but sold thousands of copies.

In the same market, the product with better marketing wins. Every time.

In the same market with equal marketing, the product with the better design aesthetic wins. Sure, a few people will dig deep enough to find that the "ugly" product has better or more functionality, but the product that wins is the one that has the best looking website and user interface.

Functionality, code quality, and documentation are all a distant fourth. I know that this sounds sacrilegious to a software developer, but unless you're marketing to software developers, your order of importance is market, marketing, aesthetic, function.

This really rang true to us. Our tendency was to begin listing out features and coding. But what we recognized we needed to do was first get market, marketing, and aesthetics nailed down.  My next several posts will be dedicated to how we tackled each of these self-imposed prerequisites before starting coding features on Name Shark (www.nameshark.com).

Series Links

Here are the links to the four follow-up posts that I wrote to this article:

• Step 1 - Market
• Step 2 - Marketing
• Step 3 - Aesthetics
• Step 4 - Functionality

Step 1 - Market   ▶