What Came First The Product Or The Community?

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter & the early 00–10s startups reasonably argue that the product created a medium for a community to come together & flourish; yet the most recent decade of startups would likely present evidence that a community exists prior to a sticky product. Like most rhetorical questions, the true, right, answer is likely nuance — somewhere in the middle.

Thankfully, one of the core principles of any successful product design process is to simultaneously address both of these pillars in tandem, as an effort to reduce uncertainty. Regardless of which came first, product-community fit is paramount as it’s the organic predecessor to product-market fit. Now that we have our findings from the Market Research Survey (the previous deliverable), it’s time to increase the likelihood of product-community fit by piecing together actionable portraits & stories of User Personas. …

Previously, we covered the history & the basics of iterating complex numbers in hopes of generating fractals. Starting from scratch with Julia Sets, we worked our way through defining & plotting the eminent Mandelbrot Set — arriving at the ground-breaking heart of fractal geometry:

The Mandelbrot Set Is A Dictionary Of All Julia Sets

The Mandelbrot Set visually communicates how varying starting constants, iterated ad nauseam in the function Z² + C, converge to Julia Sets (beautiful, connected patterns) or “blow up” into Fatou Sets (dis-connected clusters). …

Undoubtedly, one of the hardest lessons any product veteran learns from launching countless projects is that the fastest way to guarantee failure is by building something that no one cares about. This is why the very second deliverable holds a special place in in this design process: it’s the first user-facing item; aka, the first time we’re actively shaping the early community & leveraging it for actionable feedback.

While the previous Competitor & Inspiration Analysis exercise aligned all internal stakeholder goals & assumptions, the Market Research Survey tests that these same principles hold true for potential, external, early-adopters. …

Quick Intro

The Greatest Wisdom Is To Get To Know Oneself

Today, we take the authority associated with the world of science for granted; in the 16th-century, however, there was perhaps no other institution on the planet that held a monopoly on ideas & truths quite like the Church. Challenging these pious ideas, regardless of conviction or legitimate reasoning, was literal heresy.

So it’s hard to highlight just how much courage entry #16 in this series exhibited; a less-spoken part of the legend, Galileo Galilei demonstrated extraordinary resilience from both financial & legal pressures throughout his life. …

A product is destined to fail or succeed before a single line of code is ever written. There are, of course, numerous (famous) exceptions to this rule, but after operating a development agency for a long ~seven years now, I can confidently confirm that it’s relatively simple to accurately predict the success of a future product launch with only two data points:

• The size of the early community
• The quality of the design prototype

If that seems like an exaggeration, rest assured, it’s not. At SetDev, we’ve come across hundreds of first-time founders & have had the privilege of building out a handful of their MVPs. …

The starting point for the entire SetDesign product design process, the very first deliverable, is none other than the Competitor & Inspiration Analysis. While it’s a design deliverable pieced together by a single designer, it’s paramount that all stakeholders/teammates participate as the exercise is absolutely communal & collaborative. While we’ll break down the How & the What shortly, it’s best to first understand Why we start with the C&IA (competitor & inspiration analysis); we’ll expand on each reason below, however, there are at least three high-level reasons for making this the product design origin:

• Triple-Checking Business Viability By Gauging The Competitive…

Captivated by the motion of waves & mesmerized by the perfectly-imperfect symmetry of leaves, it’s crystal-clear we’re a pattern-seeking species. Externally, studies have proven that we use patterns to weigh our environment of danger — a disruption in our daily routine (particularly back in hunter-&-gather societies) signals to our conscious that something is off. Internally, patterns are inscribed in our DNA; in an energy-conservation effort, most biological processes are duplicative & are therefore likely to generate a visual form indicative of patterns.

In math, the branch of math centered around the study of continuous, patterned, yet irregular scalar symmetry is known as Fractal Geometry. …

Quick Intro

Within this already highly-selective echelon of polymaths, there exists an even more exclusive community: those that momentarily embody the soul of their country. Cemented & celebrated through erected statues, printed currencies & building eponyms, they’re defining personas typically thrust into a changing landscape. For the United States, it was Benjamin Franklin during its founding; for Russia, it was Mikhail Lomonosov during its enlightenment.

Our fifteenth protagonist this Masters of Many series, Lomonosov, led both a cultural & scientific revolution — helping position Russia as a center of 18-century Enlightenment. A man of legendary mystique, he’s well-deserving of his place among this group of polymaths. Persevering our niche focus, we explore his earlier years. …