These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Spring edition. This post is from the Connaxion team, formed by Wilson Toh and BK Khur.
Back in 2001, many brands of MP3 players were available. I was happy with my Creative Nomad Jukebox. With 6gb of storage, headphone jack, it had two line-out jacks, and a line-in jack. Sound-wise, it had a parametric equalizer, spatialization settings and environmental settings. It had plenty of features that I rarely used.
However, on October 23 2001, my world changed. An amazing gadget was released. Besides having a modest 10gb storage using a 1.8 inch hard drive while competitors used 2.5 inch ones, the iPod had an easy-to-use navigation interface, which was mainly about a mechanical scroll wheel with 4 buttons around it, and a center select button.
Since then, it has been one of the most successful selling product worldwide. As of 2010, 250 million iPods have been sold. More importantly, the iPod has been synonymous with MP3 players. Everyone loves them, well almost everyone.
So what can we learn from iPod? These are three lessons we can apply to any startup.
1. Make the benefits obvious
The typical MP3 player was described with features and terms like “10GB, parametric equalizer, AAC compatible”
The first iPod was simply “1000 songs in your pocket“.
By making the benefits obvious, your potential users will be able to understand and adopt your solution easily. This comes with proper research and understanding of your target market. Features are good to know, but benefits to your user is the thing that sells your product/service.
2. Keep it simple
Many MP3 players had a lot of features, but suffered from truncated title names, hard to navigate interfaces, music files viewable only in “tree” view, needing, buggy syncing programs, and the list goes on.
The iPod was way simpler. A click wheel, five buttons, and a simple menu system to navigate your music library. Missing volume, power and backlight buttons but it became the music player which focused most on the music with the easiest user experience.
Features are often great to have, but if the process becomes too complicated, the user experience suffers. When it gets too difficult, most users give up and switch to simpler alternatives. Therefore, keep it real simple for your users and they will appreciate it by supporting your product/service.
3. Encourage a community to build and grow on your platform / service
Having a well-designed product definitely helps, but its exceptional user experience was only part of the success formula for the iPod. The iTunes Music Store was also crucial to the whole experience. Besides having an amazing gadget, now users can buy, download and sync music to their iPods easily. As of February 2010, the 10 billionth song sold through the iTunes Music Store.
As for your product or service, it would be useful to invite and encourage a community to benefit and make money through your platform. WordPress is a good example on how developers can create premium themes to benefit users while making money.This will increase engagement and revenue for both you and your users.
