"Build it and they will come" is the most misunderstood saying in tech
Where this saying comes from and what if any merits does it have
There’s an infamous scene from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams where an Iowa farmer decides to build a baseball field in his cornfield in response to hearing a voice- “if you build it, he will come”.
Somehow, unfathomably, this quote has transformed in one of the most misunderstood yet often used saying in the tech industry, “build it, and they will come” in reference to attracting customers to a product.
These days, it is well understood that involving potential customers in the product development lifecycle from day one is key to ensuring you’re building a product people want to use.
So, how did this saying even take off in the tech industry in the first place?
In the 2000s, companies considered to be the most successful startups of the decade like Google prided themselves on being engineer-led. There’s nothing wrong with being engineer-led as long as this doesn’t lead to underinvesting in other key aspects of product building. Unfortunately in the case of some of these companies, a fixation on engineering execution came at the expense of investing in customer research & experience. This attitude has significantly evolved since then & companies like Google have majorly increased their investment in UX departments. But not without first leaving a trail of unused products in their wake (anyone remember Google+?).
The most recent example of a product launch which seems to have followed this trajectory is Quibi, the ill-fated streaming service, which failed to take off after multiple years in stealth development. While there were many reasons cited for the product failure, chief among them was a lack of understanding & validation from customers about the type of content they wanted to consume on mobile devices.
Now, the pendulum has decidedly swung in the other direction- the value of customer research & development is well understood among top product development teams. In fact, this has been internalized so much so that teams sometimes loath to launch anything that hasn’t been comprehensively tested & validated.
But by taking this other extreme approach, product teams are missing out two areas where “build it and they will come” may actually offer value: (1) helping discover new use cases for your product, and (2) bringing products to market before they are fully “ready”.
Discovering new use cases
If a product has already found strong market fit with an initial customer base, opening up the product can help discover new use cases & verticals. This was true in the case of Google Maps API, which was launched in 2005 just a few months after the initial Google Maps website was launched to much public success. After a successful end user launch, the Maps team realized that the fastest way to learn about new B2B use cases for the Maps product, was to open up their API and see what happens. In retrospect, there are areas where this launch could have gone better e.g. having a business model for the Maps API in place at the time of launch, yet this action was undeniably successful in finding new B2B verticals for Maps to grow into.
Other examples are in the category of free-to-paid products like Slack, Discord and Notion. By making a free basic version of their product available for anyone to use, these companies have found verticals to double down on and create premium paying features for. The initial product was inspired by customer feedback from one core market - other tech startups for Slack + Notion and gamers for Discord - but by making by making their product more widely available, these product teams were able to discover new use cases & verticals to expand into.
Launching before you are ready
Reid Hoffman is famous for saying- “if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late”.
This doesn’t mean that you should launch something ghastly that is buggy and impossible to use. But waiting for too long before you release your product to a wider audience won’t give you the crucial feedback you need to make it better. There are limits to the number of user research interviews you can conduct & insights you can glean with a hypothetical product.
Launching a product is just day one in the product development cycle. The iteration & improvement over time in response to customer feedback is what makes the most successful products what they are today.
Cohort-based product expansion is a good strategy to roll out your product to a limited set of users and expand that audience over time. That way, when you fail, it happens in a less public way, yet still gives you the volume of feedback you need to make your product better. That is the approach we took with launching any new game title at Niantic and with any new major feature launch at LinkedIn- we’d first roll it out to a limited set of users (often geography-based) and then iterate until the product hit certain retention & product quality metrics before expanding the audience.
Overall, I agree that skepticism on “build it and they will come” is good because it comes from a place of putting customers first & building usable products, but my view is to not let this color your judgement to the extent that you hold you your product back from launching & growing into new verticals.
Do you agree / disagree? Share your thoughts in comments below!