Happy #GrammysTNT night! It turns out that writing hit songs isn’t so different from building great products. Here’s what I learned about product from over 10 years as an indie songwriter:
🎵 Get to the point 🎵
Great songs get to the chorus within 40-50 seconds because that’s what converts listeners into fans.
@chamath was famous for identifying Facebook’s magic moment that drove retention. Every product should get to this ASAP during on boarding.
🎵 Competition is bad 🎵
It’s hard to be the best R&B artist because there are A LOT of them. @leonbridges found his edge in 50's Soul, something no one else was doing.
Messaging apps are hard for the same reason. Unless your product is 10x better, it's best not to compete.
🎵 Meet people where they are 🎵
Innovative music is almost always a derivative of popular styles and structures. @kanyewest didn’t start with Pablo, he started with conventional HS dropout
New paradigms like AR and crypto need to be tied to existing user behaviors to succeed
🎵It’s not enough to be great🎵
There are countless talented people who didnt have the luck or put in the work to make it. @PostMalone made it because he worked for a decade
Market timing and team dynamic have an outsized impact on success regardless of how great a product is
🎵 Simplicity is key 🎵
Great songwriters like Max Martin and @rickyreed say to "remove anything that isn't absolutely crucial to the song"
Product features that don't drive core metrics and/or delight users should be carefully considered against features that do.
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the tech industry has this obsession with building the "wechat of the west"
billions of dollars have been invested in creating new super apps over the years
yet we still don't have one. why? 🧵
what exactly is a super app?
there's no set framework to define it but the closest we have is this description:
"a super app is a closed ecosystem of many apps that people would use every day because they offer such a seamless, integrated, contextualized & efficient experience"
this was given by Mike Lazaridis, the founder of Research in Motion and originator of the super app concept, at the 2010 mobile world congress
he said that twitter on blackberry was a super app