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This blog post is inspired by a new product I saw. Bharani built Resumonk.com, which lets you create beautiful PDF resumes on the fly. You also get a share-able link so you can give out a link to your resume. Bharani is a college kid in New Delhi. I run Hackers and Founders, Delhi. So I am super happy and impressed to find yet another Delhi based hacker. The source code is on his github. I don't know if he is planning to make a company out of it. But his product got me thinking:

Creating a good product is half the story. Figuring out its discovery is as crucial as building the product itself.

I am reminded of Gabriel Weinberg's post on Traction: Are you building an empire, sparking a keg or starting a movement?

DuckDuckGo was built by Gabriel Weinberg. Its a search engine. The interesting aspect is that he was able to gain traction for a search engine against Google without investing a lot of money. The organic growth story. [1]

I wonder if I had built that search engine, how would I have managed to get traction for the exact same idea? [2]

    - Getting the first 1000 (committed) users was probably very hard.

DDG doesn't track you, was that the hook?
DDG has a funky name, was that the hook?
DDG had hashbangs, was that the hook?

Was it a combination of the above things? Also I don't know the order in which these things came.

Ideology: Ideology is valuable. In the beginning, a startup has nothing. It has to create some hook for people to want to use the product.

I have seen startups position against an incumbent. David Vs Golaith. Good design vs bad. Ease of use Vs broken use case.

The other key idea has been: Have one thing which dramatically make users love you. Appharbor has it. They make me love Appharbor over Azure. So I am happy to use them.

Circling back:
Bharani has made a beautiful product. Its minimally useful but dramatically convenient. It also has other competitors. So if he can get traction, then he has a business.

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[1] Gabriel thinks a lot about distribution and traction. He has a lot of good blog posts on it. Also interviews of smart people.

[2] There can be another inference, that certain people are better suited for executing on certain ideas. Or once you immerse in a problem for years, you find out ways to get traction.