The 4 approaches to building your business: Product first, user first, audience first, and brute force

I am horrified by the rise of IH theoreticians (this reference plus a recent discussion about The Lean Startup book).
Business in its essence is simple.
It is about selling.
You do not need to spend countless hours studying theories. This is a form of procrastination or fear or perfectionism or opium.
You have something of value to other people, you communicate your intentions clearly and close a deal.
Keep it simple or you will suffer.

Thank you, excellent article and a great summary! The only caveat I would add and having learned this multiple times, the only audience that matters are the audience willing to pay!

I'm currently going for the product first approach. I'm aware it's risky but I'm
still doing because:

Long time heavy user
I've been a consumer similar products during several years. The current trend of
in this space is the opposite of what I need. I'm assuming I'm not that special
and there should be other people out there interested in an alternate approach.

At a different scale, I'm following the approach Elon Musk claims he took for
Tesla: No market research, no focus groups: just design a car he would love to
drive, and hopefully other people would find it lovable too.

Non time sensitive product
The product niche has existed and will continue existing in the future. I'm
assuming the risk of a competing product with exactly the same set of features,
after all these years not seeing anything similar, is quite low.

Personal financial stability
My personal circumstances allow me to take the time to think it through,
carefully planning for the long term sustainability of the project. In the worst
scenario, if I need to look for a job, I can open source it and use it as a
portfolio showcase.

Under which circumstances would you be willing to take the risks
of going with the product first approach?

Why are people just building side business? Not main business?

I didn't know there was a name for the "brute force" approach. I'm doing it as a learning experiment currently. It's really cool to see some other folks that have done similar things.

Will definitely checkout that interview with Xavier Coiffard!

🚀🔥⚡️

Great article. I also checked out some of the case studies/interviews you mention - super useful!

I'm not keen on the brute force approach - it feels disingenuous to me, but I can see why some people like it.

I've done the product first approach in the past and it failed because I didn't get early user feedback - biggest problem with this approach. I'd go with user or audience first approach in the future.

Thanks for the tips.

Great summary of approaches to business building. I always used to think user first was the best but I'm now selling a product having taken the audience first approach and am doing much better. I think it depends on the product. There probably isn't a one best way.