Researchers studied how people decide what to work on.

This is interesting...

💬 I often get Q’s like these:

How did you get your first customers for WIP? How did you grow BetaList’s traffic? Etc.

Makers are looking to reverse-engineer success. I see it everywhere.

I don’t think it works that way and the answers to those questions are mostly useless. 💥

I have built dozens of different products over the last couple of years. The vast majority failed. 😭

Surely if I know the answers to these questions, but still fail over and over again, these answers aren’t that useful. 🤷‍♀️

So what’s a better question to ask? 🤔

99.9% of the questions I receive are about the products that did well. In a way that makes sense, because we quickly forget about those that didn’t succeed.

🧠 This is known as survivorship bias.

Focusing on what survived, while ignoring what made it survive in the first place.

The real question, what you really want to know, is this:

What makes @WIP, @BetaList, and to some extent @AllStartupJobs succeed where my countless other attempts failed?

What separates a failed product 👎 from a successful product 👍?

Honestly, I don’t know. I wish I did.

It’s like Steve Jobs said “I’ll know it when I see it.” 👀

Same is true when we make products. We don’t know upfront what will work. But once we see an inkling of a product that does have potential, it’s not that hard to spot.

Read through a forum thread on Chastity Mansion to see who is talking about the Edge-o-Matic and figure out what more to address regarding frequent questions, as well as scout out user feedback. Here's some thoughts you can carry back to the forums!

My website doesn't have any product reviews, but people scatter them everywhere else in forums, tweets, xtube vids, etc.

If you ARE a previous customer, and you like the thing, can you drop a review on my site to help others?

The price is steep, but that's the amount of coins I calculated to make these. I have several spreadsheets calculating every expense involved with this project.

The current cost sustains production and development of new tech, and is helping create jobs. We are 2 people now!!

It IS 3D printed, because injection molding is orders of magnitude more expensive for the initial tooling, and I am still making small revisions to the enclosures.

Injection molded plastics are a six thousand dollar commitment for fifteen cent parts. Great for mass mfg.

Also, if you didn't know, 3D printing technology allows for some shapes which would be difficult, expensive, or impossible on injection molding or milled parts!!

Undercuts, which I use in this design, require special lifters to mold that cost a tremendous fortune.