Product thoughts: Prioritize usefulness or monetization

One of the questions when building zero to one product is whether you want to build a product that people find useful or pay for.

It’s not a binary choice. As often if people find something useful, they are willing to pay for it.

And almost always when people pay for something, they find it useful.

But like everything related to product, the priority matters, especially in the early stage helps. Because there are limited resources you can dedicate to things. Either you prioritize making a product useful for building a feature that earns you.

Prioritize usefulness?

Many good things in life are free. Many great software free. It’s not 100% of the time that people will pay you, at least with $$$ even if they find the product useful. They would be willing to put in the time. Or share. Or leave a nice review. Or feel just grateful to have it. But still choose not to pay.

Prioritize monetization?

Often this is the right answer, but it’s how one can make it useful enough to pay. It has two downsides. First, the extreme of this is, if you prioritized short term cash, you might be giving up on large market long terms. Second, it’s too high a bar to monetize early, and can just lead to frequent pivots.

Do I really need to choose?

In the long term, it’s likely that both converge. But unless you’re venture funded, not every startup has the luxury to survive for the long term.

So you’ve a choice to either raise money or prioritize making money now. And it depends on the business you’re in. If the long-term opportunity is huge, prioritize usefulness but then focus on raising funds.

Dabbling on some of these questions as I’m building Archie AI. Currently, leaning on the option to make money now in a way that funds building usefulness. A bit like Tesla master plan (but in this case, a bit small-ish plan and we might not be Musk-enough to execute it)