Is Your Product 10X?

It’s a well-understood norm that in order to displace your competition, particularly as a startup, your product has to be a 10x product in one of these areas:

• 10x better
• 10x faster
• 10x cheaper

Is your product good enough to overcome the switching costs associated with their current solution?

I was reviewing a product the other day which solves a very real problem for me. It’s an app for recording interviews, which I do regularly for my podcast. Right now I use Skype and Call Recorder, which cost me $30 one-time. This new app will provide me with substantially better audio quality and easy to work with formats. It was really simple to use as well.

The kicker? It’s $19 a month vs. $30 one-time. That’s a HUGE difference.

At $240 a year is it really going to be that much better than what I have now? Hrm…

This is the same calculus that your customers are doing every single day.

• “The spreadsheet I use isn’t great, but it gets me what I need and it’s free”
• “Yes, I could see how you save me an hour or two a week, but I’d have to re-train everyone to use it”
• “You can’t integrate to my CRM? I have to have that”

There are a million reasons why someone will stay with their existing solutions, and most of them aren’t logical. We humans are strange decision-makers.

The reason Slack is so widely adopted isn’t because they did something novel. They took something we’ve been doing for years and made the experience much, much better (easily 10x user experience improvement).

Before you get too far down the road, you need to be sure your product is a 10x. It’s the only way you’ll be able to win customers from your competition in the future.