Octocash. That was the name of the product that two colleagues and I launched four years ago. Starting to build a product early in your career is such a great experience. Everyone is overflowing with optimism. So much optimism that it's more than enough to develop the product. It's so much excitement that deeply understanding a problem becomes optional. After designing a logo and the first screens, we coded like crazy until the product was live. Visitor after visitor, we started collecting the bitter metric of zero conversions. Oops! It quickly became clear that just opening the store's doors wasn't enough to make the business succeed.

Mussels

After that cold reality check, we started to figure out the reasons that dared to dry up our ocean of optimism. The guessing game began. Most of them pointed out a missing feature as the main cause. We don’t have conversions because the product doesn’t do this. We don’t have conversions because the product doesn’t do that. In no time, we got a massive pile of work to do. And the more we talked, the more features we wanted the product to have. We believed that each new feature we added would boost our chances of making a sale.

Faced with the huge amount of work ahead and doubting that we would be delivering anything our competitors didn’t already have, I decided to leave the project. I concluded that no matter how much goodwill we had, our complete lack of understanding of the problem made us incapable of offering something that would truly excite our customers. We wanted to convince ourselves of the product’s potential by gathering as many mussels as possible, without realizing we had no pearl to offer.

Pearl

Two years later, inspired by the homepage of a product I liked so much (WeDeploy), I started to build a new product. This time, something infinitely more modest. In addition, I was completely protected from the disappointment of no one paying for it. The product was open-source, called Glorious Demo, and allowed developers to use JavaScript to create an animation simulating the typing and execution of a code snippet. With just a few lines of JavaScript, you could create an animation that opened an editor, typed code, opened a terminal, executed commands, and received responses. It made possible with JavaScript something that, until then, required GIFs.

My first positive feedback came from none other than the leader of WeDeploy at the time, Zeno Rocha. His tweet helped Glorious Demo reach nearly forty stars on GitHub. Getting a little recognition from people I didn’t even know felt like the biggest success of my life. A few days later, on a Thursday night, I decided to publish the product on Product Hunt. On Friday morning, I woke up stunned to see Glorious Demo as the most upvoted product of the day. The project surpassed 300 stars and got featured as a trending JavaScript library on Github. One of the most popular CSS publications in the world tweeted about the project. A developer in Seattle created a website called Road To Glory that let people use Glorious Demo through a graphical interface. A South Korean programmer turned Glorious Demo into a plugin for Hexo. Blog posts were written in Arabic and Japanese.

Now, eighteen months after launch, that small product made with 80 commits has reached 3,000 stars of popularity on Github, and the project's website counts tens of thousands of visits from over 150 countries. I have no doubt that in November of 2018, I had accidentally discovered a pearl.

Impact over features

but the fact that existing features simply don't delight anyone. In the book Rework, Jason Fried and David Hansson talk about competition and the number of product features in a section called Underdo your competition. Beat your competitors by doing less, not more.

Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors, you need to one-up them. If they have four features, you need five (or fifteen, or twenty-five). If they're spending 0,000, you need to spend $30,000. If they have fifty employees, you need a hundred.
This sort of one-upping, Cold War mentality is a dead end. When you get suckered into an arms race, you wind up in a never-ending battle that costs you massive amounts of money, time and drive. And it forces you to constantly be on the defensive, too. Defensive companies can't think ahead; they can only think behind. They don't lead; they follow.

Rework

Once in a while, we may find ourselves in a situation where the product is considered behind a competitor because it has fewer features. A situation where the success of the product necessarily depends on surpassing the big list of features that the competitor already has. In that moment, we might be tempted to drive the product towards a path incapable to surprise our clients. We might even reach the absurd conclusion that our customers’ eyes will light up when we offer exactly what our competitors already do. By believing that we will beat a competitor by having more features than having the right ones is just gathering mussels. No matter how many you can pile up, they will never match the impact of a bright tiny pearl.