4 Successful products that first met with failure!
Product Management, UX, Startups, and more — freshly curated by Zeda.io
Hello, all you product-loving folks! 🥰
Welcome to this week's edition of Product Café, your weekly cup of coffee for everything product management, startups, and more. ☕
Did you know? 💬
That Steve Jobs assumed the iPad was going to fail? Because he thought people wanted keyboards. After Apple carefully surveyed and analyzed customers, they understood that there was a sizeable chunk of laptop/computer users who were only using the device for emailing and consuming content. Sure the iPhone could handle those tasks, but its smaller display was a hindrance. That’s how the idea for the iPad was born.
From failure to success!
When we think about big companies or products we use every day, we often seem to think they were always successful. Well, at least I did. For instance, the other day, I was Googling something for work but I lost internet connection for about 5 minutes and my mind went down a rabbit hole of thoughts, “What if Google was never born? What if Google had failed and they shut it down? How would have I researched stuff for work? How would I have passed College……. ahhhhhhhhhhkasdhkasdbkbdk 😥”. Before I had a mental breakdown, the internet connection was restored. In short, thank you for your service Google!
That’s when it got me thinking of products whose “success” phase we knew but not about how they started out as failed projects.
1. Nintendo
We all know Nintendo to be the OG gaming company famous for bringing Mario into the world. But the company was born almost a century ago and initially sold Ramen and ran a taxi service before venturing into the gaming industry. But the path to dominating the gaming space was first met with failure. Nintendo’s first gaming console product was the Famicom which had to be called off the market only after a few months. While the Wii was a huge success, its successor, Wii U fell short, mainly due to its poor marketing strategy. The new Wii U gamepad controller was among the best features of the Wii U, but many consumers mistakenly believed it was simply an add-on for the Wii, as global president Satoru Iwata explained in a financial results briefing for the company.
After a continuous period of low sales, Wii U was shut down and the company took time to reflect on its mistakes before releasing its next product, the Nintendo Switch. Their new marketing made it clear that this was a brand-new product. The company also had plenty of enticing launch games ready to go, such as "Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild," "Mario Kart 8," and "Splatoon 2." Nintendo Switch became one of their successful products to date and also was named 5th best-selling gaming console in the world.
Credit: One failure that changed Nintendo forever by Slash Gear
2. Rovio
The company that gave birth to Angry birds saw 51 failed games before it became a success. Rovio was started by two college students who had won a gaming competition and decided to start a studio of their own. But after several failed projects and staff layoffs, they were almost ready to call it quits. While many of their previous games catered to particular niches, they decided to create the next game for everyone. When the iPhone was released in 2007, they realized this was their big chance to target the whole iPhone user base.
From previous failed games, they learned that the following conditions were needed to make a successful game for iPhone users:
1. It should have no tutorial
2, Its loading times should be minimal
3. It could be happily played for just one minute, useful for the short attention spans of millennial iPhone users
4. It would also help to have an icon that would stand out in the App store
“When you had to shoot the bird once to test a feature, you accidentally started playing the game for 15 minutes, and there would be five guys watching you,” says co-founder, Mikael
They knew the game had potential when one of the co-founder’s mother ended up burning her Christmas turkey because she was busy playing a pre-release version of the game.
The company now has over 500 employees and a revenue of EUR 78.4 million as of 2022.
Credit: Rovio created Angry birds after 51 failed games by Office Chai
3. Reddit
The idea for Reddit was actually taken from another social news website called Slashdot. But what made Reddit stand out was the upvote/downvote system. What the founders understood was that creating a whole new product with completely new features might not click with a consumer-based tech product. Consumers can relate more when you take features that already exist and deliver more value. A great example of this would be Instagram copying Snapchat’s “Stories” feature.
Reddit saw zero users in the first month after its launch. Since a consumed-based product needs to have consumers for it to run successfully, the Reddit team decided to create fake profiles and started using the platform— creating fake discussions and forums.
This stirred up some activity and before long, outsiders started to notice the noise and took interest.
As per an article by Inc42, performance metrics like DAU/MAU were not very popular when Reddit launched. Since the company did not depend on these to calculate its progress, it decided to continue even when there weren’t many users. In a way, this ignorance worked out in Reddit’s favor, unlike other startups that decide to shut down when their DAU/MAU are not on par with their growth trajectory.
It’s like an old saying “Aerodynamically, a bumble bee's body is not made to fly; the good thing is that the bee doesn't know this, so it continues to fly.”
Credit: The story of Reddit and how it had zero users in its first month by Inc42
4. Snapchat
The idea for Snapchat was born when someone in the Stanford college fraternity said “I wish I could send disappearing photos.” The first version of Snapchat was a clunky website that allowed its users to set a timer, after which the picture they posted would disappear. Founders Evan and Bobby, turned this website into a mobile app when they realized it would be much easier and more private to use. However, the first version of the app failed because everyone who used it thought it was just a ‘fun little toy’. Although a few dozen people had downloaded the app, they weren’t sure what it was and what they were supposed to do with it. Co-founder, Evan got similar unenthusiastic responses when he presented the app at his college entrepreneurship class.
Evan was pushing Snapchat to everyone he knew, his friends, cousins, and even distributed fliers about the app at a mall near his dad’s house in LA. The app started catching on in high schools as they could send digital notes back and forth during class.
Snapchat grew organically in high-knit communities where users interact with each other frequently. This way, to keep up with the continuous communication, other users had to download the app as well.
Evan and Bobby and the rest of the early team were incredible at talking to and understanding their users which helped them achieve Snapchat’s product-market fit. The trick was to understand when to build what users are explicitly asking for and when not to build it (e.g. Snapchat released Stories years before it released group messaging, which users begged for).
Shipping the product early meant they got real-time feedback from their users which helped them iterate and re-iterate the product very quickly. Soon, the team created an Android app, video recording and sharing feature, and more.
Credit 1: The birth of Snapchat by Tech Crunch
Credit 2: How Snapchat gained success by going viral in high schools by Forbes
Good reads for extra credit 📚
1. A carefully curated list of Technical skills that Product Managers must have by Snehasri Purama, a Senior Product Manager at Sprinque.
2. A Short Story of Why My Product Failed and What You Can Learn by David Fernández, a Product Manager and co-founder of the logistics startup, Falcon Trail.
Song of the week 🎶
If the word “tranquility” was a song!
What’s brewing on Zeda.io’s side? ☕
We hosted a Product Mixer last week inviting top product minds from different companies to bond over our passion for building great products, exchange tips, and talk about our collective product journey. We’re so excited to say that it was a full house!
That’s all folks! Have something you want to share? Put them in the comments below and we’ll get back to you soon.
See you again next week! 🥂
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