You are on Linkedin. It is around 3pm on a Wednesday.
You stumble on a post from a guy you knew close 4 years ago.
He is just annoucing that he launched a company. The likes are piling up, people are reposting.
All this - while you are thinking:
No way this finds product market fit.
Fast forward 3 monthts
He posts another update:
"We just hit $3 MM in annual recurring revenue. We are hiring for sales people and engineers across the board blah blah blah"
You feel a heat coming up. It is not that you are unhappy or jealous. It is the doubt that starts eating you.
How did I now know this? Is my feel and knowledge of good products completely off?
Then you start thinking about your struggle to find product market fit.
Oh it definitely is off.
There are 2 ways to build a successful product.
It is not that complicated but like everything else, we overthink it.
On the one hand, we have your arch enemies who really don't give a shit about you: Incumbents
On the other hand, we got the simple product. Simple but with a simple twist. Even simpler. This is your friend who got to $3MM ARR in 3 months above.
I will start with the simple product because it will explain incumbent products.
1. Simple products
Simple products have 2 distinguishing features.
- They are dead simple to start. One click. One checkbox. One button.
- They solve no new problems but solve the same problem in a fundamentally different way.
Example: Perplexity
Perplexity defines itself as an answer engine. Think about this. An answer engine.
What does it do? It searches the web for you.
Well - there is one other product that does this: Google.
Perplexity launch in December 2022 and raked in 2 MM active users in 3 months.
It was a single text box that expected a search query from you.
Then it would search the web, scrape websites and spit out a summarised answer of search results with references for you.
That's it.
So what made Perplexity explode after its launch? At the end of the day, this problem has been solved by Google for more than 20 years.
And I never heard a person say: Oh I fucking hate Google.
What did Perplexity do?
Perplexity:
- took the same existing problem -> search
- delivered the solution in a different way -> conversation
They did not develop a better or a new algorithm for better search results.
They did not even get rid of the advertising model (Perplexity runs ads as of January 2025).
They just made the search experience feel and work completely different. This happened to be the preferred method to do search for a lot of people. Note that they are nowhere close to being as big as Google.
Can they be as big as Google? Who knows.
What we know is that they got a $9 Bn company at hand - pretty good if you ask me by any measure.
I will outline more examples if requested.
2. Incumbents/Platforms
The simple products from point 1 too often become platforms.
The reason is that once something simple works - it gets copied pretty fast.
This leads to the original inventor company of the product to be subject to pressure to improve, add features and find a way to build moats.
They move fast.
This usually works.
However there are a lot of cases where moving fast in this regard, makes the product a frankenstein product. Something that is disgusted.
Example: Salesforce.
Salesforce was the inventor of CRM online. You can also say the inventor of the Software as a service model.
The more they added and the more flexible they made their tool - now Salesforce is nothing different than a database.
The integration to Salesforce is always required - however not engaged with. It is like a PostgreSQL database - except you have to come into direct contact with it and you don't know how to code.
Which brings me back to the point around how to build a successful product.
Most of us as young and small teams, do not have the luxury to build an incumbent from day one. Although this is possible.
Hence you need to find a wedge. Mildly, if any, original and creative. A bit of spice here and there. The rest - just copy whatever is the best practice.