Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

Andrew Chen at Futuristic Play asks a question – Are you a product fanatic?

I think yes, I am.

To answer this question, he mentioend generic characterisitics of product fanatics as below. I have marked those things which I recognize doing most of the times.

1. You think MySpace is soooo ugly => It’s horrible.

2. You only use the best products:
Macbook Pro => Well, not Pro, but regular Macbook
Mac OS X => Yes, I love it.
Firefox => Firefox Fan!
Gmail => I thought that’s the only option we have in Webbased email services
Google Maps => It’s supercool!
Facebook => Those guys are geniuses.

3. You never use the popular products:
Dell => Had this laptop, errr..deskop before! Thank God I switched to Mac!
Windows => Avoid it as much as possible.
IE => IE Means PopUps!
Yahoo Mail => Okay, I lied earlier. I know Yahoo Mail. But it’s too slow!
Mapquest => Hey, I live in Web2.0 World.
MySpace => I still have my senses.

4. You try out new sites and judge them based on their features and functionality => Sometimes yes.

5. You assess a site’s quality based on if it’s written in Ruby versus Java => Not really.

6. You like things simple, functional, and uncluttered – cuz what else would you want? => Exactly!

7. You think your startup’s "secret sauce" is in the technology, or platform, or programming language (LISP!) => Dont’ think so for the most of the times.

8. You don’t require users to give you their emails, because it’s not what you’d want as a user => Nopes! I want it.

9. You say things like, "Just build something people want" => Yeah, and what they want – the fun stuff! Believe me!

10. You secretly worship Steve Jobs => Truely. Now it is no more a secrete.

So I think I’m a product fanatic.

And with this conclusion, I also take Andrew’s advice for not becoming too fanatical about product

• I totally understood now that, Product fanaticism != User fanaticism.
•  I do overlook innovations in other places because of my product fanaticism. I will try to improve that.
•  I will also take atmost care that my product fanaticism don’t lead to beautiful and empty websites.

Thanks Andrew, for this great learning!