A Commodity or a Creative Work? Choose What You Love and Believe In

Before building a product, ask yourself one more question: do you really like what you are about to make? Creating a genuinely valuable product is certainly not something you can do simply by talking about metrics, chasing traffic, and relying on a passing burst of enthusiasm. Instead, it requires a love of building products. --- Products can actually have two different orientations: a ‘commodity’ orientation and a ‘creative work’ orientation. The former is more like running a business; the latter is more like creating something. The first should lean toward a broad market with ample room to grow, while the second should give priority to meeting the specialized needs of a particular group of users. --- Making a ‘commodity’ / running a ‘business’ The speaker has a friend who builds mobile apps and keeps trying different kinds. None of his apps is particularly well known, and he is not attached to any particular application. For him, the sole criterion for evaluating an app is whether it can acquire as many users as possible at low cost, generate the most traffic, and monetize that traffic as efficiently as possible. He sees himself more as a ‘traffic merchant’: making money from traffic arbitrage is what gives him enjoyment and a sense of achievement. As long as it makes money, whether the product is beautifully made is not especially important. With that approach, a new product essentially has to target a mass audience. Once he has an arbitrage model, a large user base allows it to generate the greatest possible profit. --- Making a ‘creative work’ / creating something Some products have such a distinctive character from the outset that they struggle to reach a mass audience. When our sense of achievement comes from a creative work, we express our own preferences through it. Personal aesthetic preferences, in turn, tend to select for particular users. Usually, the more distinctive the personal character, the smaller the audience becomes. The speaker says that, rather than pouring traffic into a commodity, he would prefer to create a work that truly feels like his own. #QiuYueInternetProductMethodology --- Robin: ‘Entrepreneurship is fundamentally not about right and wrong, but about making clear choices. Whatever you choose, you give something else up. You can find something you genuinely love and put care into differentiating your product, or produce lots of ordinary products and see whether you get lucky. Personally, though, I still recommend choosing something you love and believe in. That is what allows you to keep going when things get difficult.’