Building 0-1 Products
Building 0-1 Products is very different from building for established products for growth. What is even more difficult is to build the first product of a new company trying to establish itself in a new or a competitive space. I have had the good fortune of being in the founding Product development team thrice in my career. The last time was my own venture into Personalised storytelling space called Merlinwand. Prior to that, I was intrumental in building Tollplus for SureIT Inc., and very early in my career was in the team building the first product of InsideView.
As witnessed in the diagram above, the first phase, amusingly known as Drunken Walk, represents the 0-1 Product Phase. This is primarily because there's a lot of confusion, a fair number of hypotheses, many pivots to problem solutions or user experience and a general haziness or unclear path to Product-Market fit.
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Some visible ways in which 0-1 Product Management can differ from a established Product growth model are:
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The primary challenge is identifying a real, pressing problem and finding a viable solution. You are creating something new, so the focus is on problem discovery, user research, and validation.
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The vision is often broad and flexible, as the product's direction can pivot based on early learnings. Strategy development is exploratory, with a focus on experimentation and adaptability.
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User feedback is critical in shaping the product, requiring rapid iterations and pivots. The feedback loop is tight, with frequent changes based on early user interactions.
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High levels of uncertainty and risk are inherent. The focus is on validating assumptions, testing hypotheses, and managing the risks of launching something new.
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Resources are limited, and teams are usually small. Product managers need to wear multiple hats, from product development to marketing and sales, often within a lean budget.
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Innovation is at the core, with an emphasis on creating something unique and impactful. The goal is to disrupt the market or create a new one.
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Customer segmentation is experimental, and finding the right target audience is a significant part of the process. Personas are often developed and refined over time.
There are many more challenges including Stakeholder management, Market dynamics, figuring out the right KPIs or Northstar metrics which can make 0-1 Product building quite frustrating but equally exciting!!
01. Merlinwand
The Challenge: In today's digital age, children are increasingly glued to their devices during their free time, which has led to a decline in traditional reading habits. Research shows that reading storybooks during childhood significantly enhances imagination, fostering creativity and innovation later in life. The challenge was to find a way to bring children back to the joy of reading books.
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The Vision: To captivate children and rekindle their interest in reading, we envisioned a world where stories were not only modern and relevant but also personalized. The idea was to make children the protagonists of their own stories, allowing them to insert themselves, their friends, and family members into the narrative. Beyond simply naming characters after themselves, kids could customize avatars to closely resemble how they or their loved ones looked. We also introduced multiple storylines within each book, giving children the power to choose their favorite paths. After making their selections, they could preview their personalized story in real time and even make edits before finalizing the order. This ensured that each book was a unique creation, tailored to the child's preferences.
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Product Execution: We developed a collection of seven stories, each with over 25 unique storylines, leading to hundreds of possible story combinations. Within three years, we successfully sold over 10,000 personalized storybooks, impacting the lives of numerous children and encouraging them to embrace reading.
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Technical Implementation: Leveraging my previous startup experience, I assembled a multidisciplinary team of authors, illustrators, backend developers, UX designers, and UI developers to bring this product to life. We utilized Java for backend development and React for the frontend, hosted on AWS cloud services. Our e-commerce platform was built on Shopify, where we seamlessly integrated the personalization workflow to ensure a smooth user experience.
Advanced visual manipulation libraries were employed to personalize not only the text but also the illustrations in real time, a key innovation that allowed us to offer a live preview of the personalized book to customers before purchase.
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MVP and Market Validation: To validate our concept, we conducted extensive market research, focusing on children aged 5-15 and their reading habits. We explored how much time younger children spent listening to stories read by their parents and gauged interest in personalized storybooks featuring the children as characters. This research validated our product idea and shaped the development of our MVP.
Feedback from prospective customers highlighted the importance of a live preview feature, which we included in the MVP to increase the likelihood of immediate purchase. This feature proved to be a crucial element in converting interest into sales, driving the product's early success.
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Through this process, we successfully created a product that not only addressed a significant problem but also resonated deeply with our target audience, leading to measurable impact and growth.
02. TollPlus by SureIT
Context: SureIT, a system integrator in the highway tolling market, had extensive experience implementing tolling products for transit authorities. However, the leadership recognized a significant gap in the market due to the inefficiency and outdated technology of existing tolling systems.
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The Challenge: The existing tolling products were not only technologically outdated but also failed to efficiently capture all vehicles passing through toll booths. With the exponential increase in vehicle traffic, the existing systems struggled with scalability and performance, leading to significant inefficiencies.
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The Vision: Leveraging their deep understanding of the market and insights gained from close collaboration with customers, SureIT's leadership decided to build their own tolling product, TollPlus. They brought me on board to lead the development of this product from the ground up. The goal was to create a modern, scalable, and efficient tolling system that could meet the growing demands of transit authorities.
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Product Execution: TollPlus was designed with multiple integrated components to address the specific needs of transit authorities, back-office operations, and end-users:
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Transit Authority Admin Application: This component allowed transit authorities to set pricing (both static and dynamic), manage rules within a rules engine, and handle account management tasks.
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Back Office Application: This was the core of the system, processing tolling data from IoT sensors and cameras, managing financial operations, calculating tolls, sending notifications to users, and integrating with DMV, payment gateways, and transit authorities for account reconciliations.
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User Application: This application provided individual vehicle owners with details about their vehicle ownership, toll locations, and billing information.
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Data Science Component: This component performed predictive analysis of traffic, weather patterns, seasons, events, and festivals to recommend dynamic pricing. It was built on a Big Data platform, which we later productized as a Big Data Platform-as-a-Service (BDPaaS) for common use cases.
Technical Implementation: We developed a complex, highly scalable architecture using a robust tech stack:
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Backend Development: Java
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Containerization & Deployment: Kafka and Docker
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Rules Engine: Drools
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UI Development: React
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Machine Learning Models: Python
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OCR for Text Detection: To process images and accurately capture data
The system was designed to handle up to 20 million transactions per day, far exceeding the peak requirement of 5 million transactions.
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MVP and Agile Development: The development process was heavily research-driven, drawing insights from leadership and transit authority experts. This knowledge helped us prioritize features, build cadences, and simultaneously test the system. We adopted an Agile approach, building and iterating quickly, allowing us to fail fast and incorporate new requirements and scenarios that were not addressed by existing products. This approach was crucial in overcoming challenges, such as vehicle identification failures.
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Team Building: In addition to building the product, I also assembled the team from scratch. The initial hires included an Engineering Leader, a UX Designer, and a DevOps resource. Over time, we expanded to a 25-member team, including backend engineers, testers, UI developers, and data scientists. A highly experienced System Architect was also brought on as a peer, playing a pivotal role in the product's development and orchestration.
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Impact and Success: The success of TollPlus led to a major $144 million implementation with the North Texas Transit Authority (NTTA) and a long-term contract with the Ireland Toll Department, each lasting 10 years. These significant contracts were a testament to the product's success and its contribution to solving critical challenges in the tolling industry.
03. InsideView
The Problem: Between 2006 and 2008, B2B SaaS was still in its early stages, with Salesforce (SFDC) emerging as a game-changing platform for enterprises. Despite this, the traditional sales model remained outdated, relying heavily on cold calls as the primary method for product sales. With the advent of innovative CRM systems like SFDC, which managed customer relationships, leads, and opportunities, there was a clear opportunity to modernize the sales process. InsideView recognized the need to move beyond the inefficient cold call model and leverage the increasing availability of information and data to create a more effective and streamlined sales approach.
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The Vision: InsideView aimed to revolutionize the sales process by turning cold calls into warm calls using data and information as key tools. The product was designed to aggregate vast amounts of information about companies and executives from over 40,000 different sources. This data was then processed and transformed into timely, relevant, and actionable insights that sales teams could use to make informed and personalized warm calls. The initial product was launched as an application within the SFDC AppExchange, where SFDC managed the sales process while InsideView populated it with pre-validated information.
My Role: I joined the founding engineering team as a Data Engineer, focusing on data pipelines, platform development, and linguistic data science (NLP and NER). As the product evolved, the leadership recognized the need for a dedicated Product Management function for the data platform, not just for user-facing applications. This presented an opportunity for me to transition into product management. I immersed myself in learning from the company’s Product Managers and leadership, gaining experience in customer interactions, user interviews, market research, and prioritization frameworks. This period also marked our adoption of JIRA and Confluence for project management and collaboration.
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Technical Implementation: The initial tech stack was on-premise, utilizing Java, MySQL, Angular, Jenkins, and in-house servers. As the product grew, we transitioned to cloud-based infrastructure on AWS, incorporating technologies such as Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, RDS, and the Lambda architecture framework. To handle the rapidly increasing data volume, we undertook a significant refactor of our codebase, shifting to HDFS, Hadoop, Hive, Oozie, and Kafka. We also integrated data science-specific languages like R and Python, along with advanced libraries, to enhance our data processing capabilities. I led this comprehensive refactoring project, managing 27 resources and completing it in 9 months.
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Impact and Success: My leadership in data engineering for the initial sales product played a crucial role in its success. By the time I left InsideView, this product was contributing $35 million, accounting for one-third of the company’s annual revenue. This transformation not only modernized the sales process but also established InsideView as a leader in using data to drive business outcomes in the B2B SaaS space.
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