> "Your startup needs to sell experiences, not features"
Eh,
What about B2B startups? What about any utility application? Say, internet search? I'm going to kill Google (and Gabriel Weinberg) if they turn their search engine into an "experience".
Seriously, guys, can we stop the "startup == social local friend to friend mobile app thing" thing already?
Early Google was an experience. It gave you a few links in a very minimal layout, and that was it. Yahoo and Altavista gave you incredibly big portals with lots of features that didn't really go to bed together. They lost, because theirs were a shitty experience.
The iPod is an experience. Most early MP3s had the same or more features, but the iPod killed them, because it provided an interesting experience of listening to music.
Amazon is just another Walmart, too. But with a buyer experience that's much better than anyone else's. Same thing with Facebook vs. MySpace. Or Steam vs. Origin vs. your local videogame shop.
Search /is/ an experience, and it always has been. Google is just making that experience suck lately.
UX is the most important feature. Canonical example: Apple. Apple "gets" usability. No other pc manufacturer comes close. Their methods are dubious and I don't agree with all of them, but their stuff works nicer than anything else right now (for the latest number of lay people.)
Other pc mfgs don't even try to design beautiful, elegant hardware and market it to everyone. They think that everyone wants cheap crap, so they deliver and iterate on that. All of Apple's offerings are premium, and you can't argue with their success. /people want nice stuff, not cheap plastic crap/ -- but it gets harder and harder to find nice stuff outside of Apple.
Who still makes a laptop with a 1920x1200 display? Apple. HP and Lenovo did too last I checked, but the industry has largely moved to the cheaper-and-worse 16x9 panels. Apple also cares about obvious stuff that other mfgs ignore. Example: trackpad texture. Even on a $3500 gaming laptop from a specialty mfg, they don't get it and the trackpad is too grippy and hurts your finer after 5 minutes.
Quality is just one corner of the triangle; speed and cost are the other two. Many people value speed or cost in their products more than quality (I am not just talking about computers). Your motto sounds great and all, but it's not how business works.
Sorry, I was just trying to dig up the startup-related insights from the study :)
What I guess the article meant to say in another way is that your startup needs to focus on its value proposition, “How will buying/using this ... make my life better?”.
In the case of both Google and DDG, what they deliver to the user. It's no accident Google has Instant, previews, etc (and DDG has DuckDuckHack)... it's all about making the search experience better.
Hmm, i see your point. Yet, I don't think "user experience" and the article's "experience" are at all the same thing. They're related, but only very remotely, IMHO. Therefore I misunderstood your comment.
Given the examples in sibling posts, we have to step back and define what we mean by "experience" as opposed to "utility". Saying "X is experience" for everything renders it pretty much meaningless.
A corollary is "Your startup needs to sell experiences, not features":
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2662671
Previous discussions ("Money = Happiness, but when it buys experiences"):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482036
"Spend money on experiences, not possessions"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1825525