By In my formative years as a tech entrepreneur, Paul Graham (cofounder of YCombinator), wrote a seminal essay entitled: Be Good. Most tech folks have forgotten the essay itself, but almost everyone has heard the viral piece of advice that came out of that post: “Make something people want.”
It’s pithy. Short. Timeless. And a great bar to measure your product, feature, marketing campaign, blog article, or social post against. When you fail, it’s because people didn’t want what you made. And when you succeed, or someone else does, it’s because that’s what people wanted.
Then came the problems: millions of companies and people creating things they were certain people wanted, but that, despite fulfilling this universal need, failed. Companies, products, features, marketing campaigns, pieces of content—being wanted wasn’t enough. Arguably, in the first few years that followed Graham’s essay, at least in the hockey-stick-growth world of software, the advice worked. But within a decade, there were hundreds of companies making every kind of wanted software, and millions competing for attention alongside the rapid rise of entertainment-and-outrage-for-engagement platforms that dominate modern life today.
That’s why I made this video, and am publishing this blog post: “make something people want,” isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete. It doesn’t take into account the competition-for-attention and competitive product landscape modern companies and creators exist within.
My advice today for aspiring creators, entrepreneurs, and product feature creators is: “make something people want to talk about.”
If this advice can help someone in your world, hopefully I can nudge you to share it with them. Their new bar is:
- Make something people want (which means you need to prove market need, demand, and desire)
- Make that thing something people want to talk about (which means answering the hard question: Who will amplify this and why?)
Good luck, friends. 🤗