A scene from last week
Thanksgiving Day: 5pm. Our friends & family are here.
The table is set with linen, napkins, place mats, glasses, candles, and salt cellars. There are extra leaves in the table, making it bigger. There are extra chairs. 1940’s jazz is playing.
We sit down to eat truffled cauliflower soup, turkey, gravy, maple ginger cranberry sauce, stuffing, corn bread muffins, mashed potatoes with brown butter and cheddar, and green beans with candied almonds and bacon. There’s mulled cider to drink, and dessert, too.
This is an ordinary scene, played out in dining rooms all over the country... at the same time. In other countries, too, just on different days, and different dishes.
In other words, it’s not a big fucking deal.
That’s because dinner parties are a pretty known quantity. You have...
an audience, all of whom have specific needs & wants – a work environment, with certain tools
a list of requirements that need to be met
raw materials
a process to turn those raw materials into something your audience can use (or at least eat)
a deadline
Sounds familiar, right?
It’s just like making a product.
But while dinner parties aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, could you do it? If you had to? If your health & happiness depended on it?
Yes. You could. You know you could.
If you can plan a dinner party, you can ship a product.
People get all lathered up about books, blogs, screencasts, video courses, workshops, presentations, themes, icon sets, templates, tools, libraries, open source projects, and software because it’s their work.
But those same people would agree: I could host a dinner party, if I had to. (Even if it wasn’t the funnest, sexiest dinner party ever.) (Even if it involved lame party games.)
You can serve a dinner, complete with side dishes and beverages, in a suitably attractive environment, to people who want to eat it, roughly on time.
You absolutely can.
You just need to equip yourself with:
The right approach
The right techniques
The right ingredients
The right tools
And that’s what this book will give you.
Don’t think Big, Scary Product.
Think dinner!
Moral of the story
Don’t exaggerate the importance of the digital product that you want to build. If you can make a dinner (and you can, I know this) you can build a digital product. Don’t think big scary digital product, think dinner!
Besides, if all else fails you can still order take-out ;)
(From Just Fucking Ship It by Amy Hoy.)