Must need v/s nice to have

Building a Product

I notice that majority of the startups that I come across are either B2C or B2B. B2C make a product whose end user will be a human customer where as B2B serve another business(es).

Building B2B or C2B requires domain knowledge of particular businesses which most of recent grads like myself don't have. On the other hand, imagining yourself as a customer of any e-commerce or internet service comes intuitive to us, as we have been consuming different products our entire life.

It especially helps being in mid-twenties right now in India, as its demographic is skewed highly towards young people. That means most of the people using your service—if you open an internet-based startup in India—will be under 30. This gives a lot of edge to young entrepreneurs in terms of tapping the nerves of their audience.

Idea Exploration

I came up with some B2C ideas in the last couple of months. These ideas were good on their own and were not blatant copies of something already done in the western world. But a big barrier I found was that these were “nice-to-have” products, not “must-haves.”

But then I thought—is that really a barrier?

When I think about tech giant companies like Google, Facebook, Paypal, etc., and how they started, I find that most of them were not must-haves in their early days. This made me think: when you're ideating a new product, do you imagine it to be a must-have or a nice-to-have?

Defining Must-Haves and Nice-to-Haves

There are certain products that have become necessities of our lives, without which we cannot imagine living (e.g., vehicles, electricity, buildings). Then there are “nice-to-have” products like a Tag Heuer watch or a Mercedes-Benz—you can do without them.

But this classification also depends on several variables:

Time: Mobile phones were once “nice-to-have”; now they are essential.
Place: Living standards vary drastically across regions.

Therefore, these attributes (must-have vs. nice-to-have) apply to specific segments of society and must be evaluated based on context.

Start by imagining your product for one demographic of the society at a time and then scale it up.
Ask: Is it a must-have for that group now? Could it become one in the future?

Peter Thiel once said:

Start small and monopolize small markets. But small doesn't mean non-existent.

Creating a Market

Creating a market for oneself is not new. A friend once explained this beautifully with an example:

We had only one night canteen in our university campus. We had to walk half a kilometer for snacks, so most students went only when truly hungry.
Then, night canteens were introduced in each hostel. Suddenly, more people went, some who never went before, and those who went rarely became regulars.
A midnight catering market was created.
We never knew we were hungry every night until the option existed.

Examples from Big Tech

This holds true for many breakthrough companies:

Ford: When automated cars launched, there was no proven market.

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." – Henry Ford
Google & Facebook: Cool to have at first; now social connection is a digital necessity.

These companies didn’t just serve a market—they created one by tapping into the human nature of their users.

Peter Thiel again:

"The future will always be different, but it will always be rooted in the present world."

So, How to Know If Your Idea is a Must-Have?

I believe most game-changing companies initially presented a solution to an existing problem that seemed nice-to-have, but they made it indispensable over time by being 10x better than existing alternatives.

Examples:

Ford: Replaced horses with more efficient transport
Google: Better search UX
Paypal: Secure, fast money transfer
Amazon: Brought shopping to your screen
Apple: Created a consumer tech market from scratch

They converted nice-to-haves into must-haves.

Sometimes, your users may not even know what they need—which is why building something visionary often means not always following customer feedback blindly.

Final Thoughts

Edward J. v. K. Menge said:

"Breeding homing pigeons that could cover a given space with ever-increasing rapidity did not give us the laws of telegraphy, nor did breeding faster horses bring us the steam locomotive."

Identifying a market is key. Many game-changer companies created monopolies by solving real problems in radically new ways. Even spotting such problems is a journey on its own.

Now that technology is reaching more people than ever, and the internet has made phenomena like virality and data-sharing commonplace, the tech world’s potential is enormous—and evolving fast.

Technology is, after all, about blurring the lines between must-haves and nice-to-haves—creating things that never existed before.

📝 Edit (2015/06/08)

Found out that there's a course on Udacity — How to Build a Startup — where the concept of creating new markets is elaborated.