(Unfinished)

Which would you rather have:

• An app that, based on preferences you enter about cuisine, price, experience, etc., comes up with a list of restaurants in your neighborhood that fit your criteria?
• A friend who’s been to every single restaurant in town that you can always count on to come up with a great suggestion for food, no matter what you’re in the mood for?

With some exceptions (and there are always exceptions), I’d rather go to the person first, then the app. Yelp has plenty of suggestions for coffee and wi-fi in the city, but I still check Cafe Talk. Amazon has great reviews, but I’ll often still look at the page of that one blogger who writes a 20 page article just to talk about the pros and cons of one set of headphones.

Why pick one person’s opinion over the wisdom of crowds and a 200 million dollar company?*

Simple: The person cares, and the person is a person.

*Note: Yelp is actually an exception, to the extent that its full of people. But the people all care about different things.

Products are utilities, services are solutions

First off: this doesn’t apply everywhere.

I don’t need a personal assistant to read me my emails or backup my files. I’m OK with large warehouses of computers doing that, because I know exactly what needs to be done and there isn’t anything surprising or complicated about it. When I know what I need, I look for a utility.

What separates utilities from solutions? Uncertainty.

If I’m looking for a website designer, who would think it was acceptable to hand me a copy of Photoshop, a book on HTML, and say, “here’s your app, go for it?”

A utility is designed to take things we know we need and get them. The best utilities tend to be well targeted and have a specific function. No one has to ask Instagram what he does at a party; it’s pretty ______ obvious.

But even there – how did you get introduced to Instagram?

Did a friend tell you about it? Did you read about it in a blog? Did you see someone using it?

Instagram started out as something unknown, and when it comes to unknowns, we need a personal introduction.

Even if it’s a product, start out with a service

I know the eventual goal of a product-driven startup is to build something that “scales” out–the definition of scale being that we can go out and have a picnic while our software makes monkey.

Nonetheless, I see lots of people who start out with the picnic. Oh, they may be working hard on their product, but there’s no relationship to the customer. They build the system and throw it over the wall and hope it goes viral. Starting a connection to your customers through an impersonal, on-stage launch is how you get casual interest. At the beginning, there will be no one but you to give a personal introduction to your gadget.

It can be as simple as telling the story of what it does and letting them use it, but you have to provide that service the first few times around. Even in the greatest product driven businesses, it’s people who are telling the story, not the product. The eventual goal of scale is not to stop telling the story, but to have others tell it for you.