Will my product be successful?

The easy way to know if a new product will be successful.

To answer the question "Will a new product be successful?", all we really have to know is the strength of the need and the quality of the solution.

If a concept lives on the left (low need), teams have to iterate like crazy, get lucky, or try many potential solutions to get to success. Think social media--no one needs a virtual social network, but the solution to the problem that Facebook originally created shined because of great performance and exclusivity. The solution was worth our time.

If the concept lives on the right (high need), teams can have a pretty bad solution and still win if it even somewhat solves the need. Meanwhile, great solutions become generational champions (ex: Google search, Palantir, SpaceX). The lottery is a great example of the former--you're almost guaranteed to lose your money (bad solution!), but the human desire to make giant amounts of cash with no effort is so incredibly high that a terrible product still excels.

My point is that three out of four of these quadrants support strong businesses, but what you have to focus on and how you generate success changes dramatically.

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