The Frog in Hot Water

You identify a niche, you build a product.

You talk to a few early customers, they try it out.

As a startup you have a zillion things to do. Out of the many axes of optimisation, you optimise the few that you want to strategically focus on.

Your customers love it, it solves a big problem for them. They are excited about it.

The good word about your product spreads and you attract more customers. Soon you have a healthy growth rate.

And then it happens. What your customers thought were minor inconveniences have snowballed into a major issue stream with your product.

Everything was going well, so what exactly happened?

As your product evolves, your customer set evolves too. The early adopters were more adaptable, because it fixed a pain point for them. As your product becomes mainstream, the customers that you attract, and their expectations are mainstream. They expect things on the axes that you didn’t intentionally optimise for.

What you choose to do when faced with this solution is up to you and your product’s domain. But it helps to be cognisant of the fact that this may happen, and look out for it before it is too late to leap out of the pot.

How often are you in the ‘flow’?

You are coding away. A minute goes by… You check the watch, and its been two hours!

You don’t know how those two hours went by, but they were very productive. You feel good. Happy. A joy that comes of active creation.

You, my friend, were in the flow. It’s a state that is a reward in itself, a state with your highest of performance.

Given that, can we try to create conditions to get into that state as frequently as possible? What works for you? How often do you find yourself in the flow?

I find myself at my productive best when I can get at least two sessions of complete concentration in a day. These sessions don’t include checking email, or Facebook, or having design discussions or reviewing other’s work. They include working by myself, typically on a programming assignment. And often it happens when the stuff is churning in my mind for quite some time. So once I sit down, all those thoughts just spill over through the keyboard onto emacs.