The North Star of Building Products
Any sustainable business must achieve two things: a way to attract and convert new customers to the product, and a way to retain existing ones. As time goes on, in a perfect world, we’d be serving both of these customer segments with an ever-improving value proposition.
We want to get here, an ideal north star that simultaneously serves the needs of our existing users and also attracts potential new users:
But as anyone who has released or sold a product before knows, this is never the path actually taken. At any given stage, no matter how straight you hope to trek, you’re always over-serving the requests of one of these two cohorts. And as a result, you’re always under-serving the requests of the other. In actuality, the path looks like this: