You Built It, Now Here’s Why They’re (Not) Coming

In the 1989 movie, Field of Dreams, the main character hears a whisper that tells him if he builds it, “he will come.” It turns out to be true. This phrase has become popularized in business as “If you build it, they will come.” Meaning that if you build your product, venue, or solution, the customers will show up.

Of course, anyone who has built a product, venue, or solution knows that this isn’t always the case.

There are thousands of sprawling, empty, dead malls across the United States to show that even when they do come, they don’t always stay.
We’re in a phase right now where companies have been building technology solutions at breakneck speed for decades. And the pace of building just got a massive steroid shot from AI. You would have to be hiding under a rock not to notice that almost every large technology platform out there now has launched some kind of AI “assistant” (the usefulness of which can sometimes be debated, but the existence of which is impossible to deny). The number of start-up AI-powered tools is mind-boggling. Everyone wants to slap the AI tag on their product to join the hype. And the hype is just getting started.

Most of these start-ups and most of the big-name tools that got rolled out “just because they could” will fail—and fail miserably. I’m not a fortune teller. I have just been in business long enough to know.

Because the truth is: Building it is not enough. It won’t make them come to you.

A Sample Case: One Programmer’s Story

I was talking with a friend recently who’s a programmer. The friend works for a company whose founders came up with a really cool idea, and then they built it. They spent tens of millions of dollars over multiple years, and the product itself really is pretty cool.

Building a product is not enough. It won’t make them come to you.

They put it in the hands of potential customers, and they loved it–as long as it was free. The trouble is that customers don’t want to pay for it. Now, the company is in trouble because they can’t generate enough revenue to justify their expenses. It feels to them like their trouble started after the launch or subsequent pivots, but it actually began at the very beginning.

They had a cool idea, but they didn’t take the time to understand their customer and to design the product around a defined or expressed need.

And that, in a nutshell, is the root of most failed product launches, in my opinion. The founder or developer had a cool idea, customers said that they wanted it, customers might even have enjoyed the beta version of it, but when it comes time to pay for it, they won’t do it because it doesn’t fulfill a genuine need that they have.

In the end, it’s just a cool toy.

How To Build Something That Customers Will Actually Flock To

The key to building a product that customers will actually gladly pay for, in large numbers, is to build something that fulfills a critical need or want for them in a way that nothing else does as well.

This is an unglamorous solution because it doesn’t center around personal genius or bright ideas. It centers around customer research, taking the time to understand the people who will use a product. It means investing a great deal before you even begin to raise money or hire developers.

It means not jumping on the bandwagon of the latest technology advances (like AI) just to be able to say you’re using them. It means slowing down, backing up, and looking at what actually needs to be done by the customers you want to serve and then helping them do that.

The company I mentioned earlier, where my friend works, is trying to reverse-engineer this process. They have a product; now, they’re trying to understand how the customer wants to use it so they can improve it and become profitable.

Unfortunately, reverse engineering is much more work and complex than if a product is built to serve the need from the start. They’re struggling and will probably continue to struggle.

As founder and CEO of a technology company, I get asked a lot about the role of AI in my industry. The truth is AI can be a super powerful tool. But before we infuse it into everything just because it's cool, we need to slow down and back up and ask what our customers actually need. What problems are they trying to solve? And what will actually help them solve those problems in a good way?

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a place in innovation for ideas that customers haven’t thought of yet. Sometimes, people don’t know what they need until they see it. True visionaries see beyond what customers are clamoring for to the deeper needs that they haven’t yet discovered.

What I’m trying to say is that we have to get outside our near-sighted view of what we personally think is cool, what everyone is talking about, or what we think would be fun to build, and discover what customers will actually use, pay for, and benefit from. That’s how you build a better product and a stable company.