17 – WordPress Product Development – Using a 4-Step Process to Build Something People Want to Buy

How do you make sure all the software products you spend time building with WordPress are something that your customers will actually want to buy?

It’s one thing to spend a few weeks coding your next big idea. But are you sure that you have an audience of customers that want what you’ve built?

Turns out coding it was the easy part, but making sure people actually wanted to buy what you were selling was the hard part.

The good news is that there is actually a process you can go through to
1) Target a specific customer-set for your product
2) Learn how to design a product that will solve a problem your customer-set has
3) Make your product habit-forming so people come back again and again

Instagram, as well as Facebook, are classic examples of products that fulfill a key customer need, sharing their lives with as many people possible, and that are also habit-forming. Those apps have a habit-forming process based on deep insight into the needs of their users baked into their design.

Now, I’m not saying in this presentation I can teach you how to become the next Mark Zuckerberg. Instead, what I am saying is that in this talk, you’ll learn a process to validate the products you want to build to ensure you maximizes the impact it will have on your customers’ lives, and therefore on your business.

In plain English, the process is called The Hook. The Hook is a repeatable cycle of four steps that most habit-forming products send us through over and over again. I’ll go through the four steps of the hook, and explain how to apply it to the next software project you start.