Steve Guttman asks a question every entrepreneur and product needs to ask and answer:
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What problem does this product solve?
This simple question is the central issue behind product success or product failure. And it’s one that company executives often can’t answer coherently. They’ll often talk about how their software provides a smoother, more efficient interface, and how users can attack more sophisticated problems with its abilities. For businesses, there are only two problems that need solving: how do I increase revenues; how do I decrease expenses?
Your software can beat mosttwo steps removed from those issues to be viable. If it makes users more efficient, that efficiency needs to be directly translatable to increased sales or cost savings. If it lets users address more complex issues, make sure those issues affect profits. Features don’t sell software; benefits don’t sell software; measurable effects on the bottom line, do. Products that are only”nice-to-have,” have limited potential.
My answer for our Emergic Freedom solution: we cut computing costs by 75% as compared to the MS-Windows-Office platform. The money saved goes straight to the bottomline. The savings could also be used to grow the penetration of computing in the enterprise. For most users, the Linux desktop we offer is more than good enough for everything that they need to do.
