Every successful tech company like Amazon, Stripe, and Y Combinator has “put your users first” as a core principle. But despite sounding obvious a

Common ways startups fail to make what people want (and what to do instead)

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2024-10-06 21:30:03

Every successful tech company like Amazon, Stripe, and Y Combinator has “put your users first” as a core principle. But despite sounding obvious and easy, many startups still fail to deliver something their users actually want.

To understand why it’s so hard to make something people want, we need to start with the history of how “users first” came to be an important business principle. “Users first” began, believe it or not, 2.5 million years ago.

Everything you could possibly need was either made by you or by someone you closely knew, perhaps a family or community member. This is how the majority of things were made for millions of years.

Then we time warp to the 19th century where something changed: we started making things using automatic looms, printing presses, and steam engines to harness the power of fossil fuels.

We usually think of the industrial revolution as a technological revolution, but perhaps even more importantly, the industrial revolution was a management revolution.