Reverse Engineering a Product
From the Press Release
This post is Pt II to Steal My App, I Dare You
Let’s talk about Apple for a second.
Apple has a secret new product process called the ANPP.
It molds the team structured as a startup, and it details every steps on building and shipping a product.
This document lays out every step in the development process of a product in detail. It’s not an original Apple concept but was first applied at the company during the development of the Macintosh. It maps out the stages of the creation process, who is responsible for completion, who will work on each stage and when they will be completed.
I want to develop my own product process, so here it goes.
Jackalope’s product process starts completely ass-backwards.
Reverse engineering the press release:
When Amazon builds a product ass-backwards, they start first by doing the last thing most companies would do– the press release.
If the initial press release isn’t promising enough to catch a superior’s attention, it doesn’t get built. Simple as that. That’s starting with the end in mind.
The Press Release:
Write it out. Even if you don’t feel you’re ready. This forces you to light up your imagination and visualize the concept. Done is better than perfect. Just write.
- Heading — Name the product in a way the reader (i.e. your target customers) will understand.
- Sub-Heading — Describe who the market for the product is and what benefit they get. One sentence only underneath the title.
- Summary — Give a summary of the product and the benefit. Assume the reader will not read anything else so make this paragraph good.
- Problem — Describe the problem your product solves.
- Solution — Describe how your product elegantly solves the problem.
- Quote from You — A quote from a spokesperson in your company.
- How to Get Started — Describe how easy it is to get started.
- Customer Quote — Provide a quote from a hypothetical customer that describes how they experienced the benefit.
- Closing and Call to Action — Wrap it up and give pointers where the reader should go next.
Heading:
Spots: centralized mental inventory.
Spots: never misplace anything
Spots: Everything in it’s right place
Spots: minimalist, organized
Sub-heading:
- Minimalize your life.
- Organize your life.
- Spots is OCD, so you don’t have to be
Summary:
Tag and label a spot for all of your belongings with your camera, now Spots will automatically train you to keep your things organized.
Problem:
- Keeping track of your things wastes mental energy
- People have too many things
Solution:
- An app that keeps your mental inventory for you
Features:
- Add custom links to items, can be affiliate links
- Integrate with chips like Tile to become more than a behavioral programming app– upgrades to a location tracking app.
Quote:
Before I started internally running this app in my mind I would misplace things. Not to mention that I realized how many items I owned I wasn’t even using.
How to get started:
First, choose what kind of user you want to be–
Basic User: Whenever you misplace an item, snap a photo of it and assign it a specific location.
Pro User: Walks you through how to consolidate your belongings into less than 100 items, then you assign each item a specific location
Call to action:
Want to organize your life?
Click here to be notified when Spots is available for free download.
Want to help me build Spots?
Click here to _____.
Want to steal Spots from me?
Go right fucking ahead. I will be your first paying customer– provided I like how it turns out to be cool.
Everything you’ll need to get started can be found in The Deliverables at the bottom of this post.
Elevator Pitch:
Fact: We have a limited amount of mental energy– a limited amount of decisions we can make a day.
Our minds only climax at efficiency for brief moments. We need to not waste those moments on decisions like, “where are my keys?” “What am I going to wear?” or “where am I going to eat?”. All of these decisions can be automated, so every mental calorie you use up is used wisely.
It’s true that Ed Cooke, grandmaster of memory, can memorize a deck of shuffled cards in 43 seconds, but that’s not due to mental capacity. It’s due to mental indexing- it’s an efficiency boost, not a capacity boost.
I want to be like the dude on Limitless. I want to get to this imaginary, made up place in my mind, where my mental process is flawlessly organized. A perfect mental flow state that creates inevitable success. In this fictional place, everything is always in its right place. I never misplace anything. I’m always on time, my bed is always made, and I know where everything is. I know where my keys are, I know where my wallet is, I know where my deodorant is, I know where my condoms are. My items are packed with the precision of an assassin. That’s how you get shit done. Organization, process, and simplicity.
When I leave the house I’m thinking, ‘keys, wallet, phone,..’. I do it again when getting in the car, getting out of the car, leaving the office, leaving the gym, and getting home.
We run these mental inventory checks all throughout the day. The problem is that most people waste a lot of energy keeping track of their items.
How can we conserve that energy?
Evernote allows us to index our thoughts safely away where we knew we won’t forget them, so we don’t have to remember them. It’s frees up a lot of space.
Trying to remember things without writing them down is like trying to remember where your keys are when your only reference point is when you last remember seeing them- which is rarely much help.
Why have our pockets and our bags not been integrated with technology?
Why not automate and outsource this process of constantly trying to keep track of things?
You only have so much given mental power each day, so everything that you truly want needs to be streamlined and automated.
Whether it’s what you’re going to eat that day, or what you’re going to do that day– all of these things add to decision fatigue.
Spots keeps track of your shit, so you don’t have to– and gives you more mental capacity to put into your creative work. It outsources your OCD tendencies so that you can sit back and get shit done.
If you want the Deliverables and Learning Resources to complete this app or do one similar, you can find those back in Pt. I of this post–
