(todo) 0 to 1

When an organization that has never operated a product tries to go 0 to 1,
the major things they tend to overlook
are the customer and the acquisition channels.

Having only dealt with client companies or institutional project owners,
they tend to just build based on the union — or intersection — of the requirements they gathered from various clients and agencies.
While on service-work projects costs are calculated in M/n (man-months), when they move to their own product they tend to neglect managing this.
Because you’re building for someone you can’t see, who may not even be willing to pay, there end up being holes not only in the requirements but also in build and operating costs.
And because people who have actually done a 0-to-1 are very hard to find in the market, all sorts of issues arise while senior people who have never lived through it try to lead. In the end, even the build work they used to be good at fails to reach the desired quality.
Fulfilling requirements and defining requirements are very different things. Like choosing a personal career path, the direction is vague, there’s no right answer for process or outcome, and you don’t even know how long it will take. (In truth, personal life also tends to follow the preferences and approval of others more than what one genuinely loves…) On top of that, even after one person has gathered the requirements, getting multiple teams or members inside the organization to understand, agree on, and align around them is an agonizingly long road.

But there is something even more serious.
There’s another blind spot for SI and agency-style service organizations.
While you hear the term endlessly in the industry and every bit of vocabulary reflects it, most people only “see” without truly looking and “speak” without truly talking — about user experience, UX.
Websites, dev docs, the product inside and out, even the names of organizational departments are getting UX attached, but in most cases there are no team members who have actually practiced user experience and no procedures to do so.
Even if they exist, they often get stuck in feedback on individual features inside the product rather than the customer’s entire journey. And so instead of focusing on the actual hole, they fixate on the drill of a specific competitor — the one with higher revenue, more brand awareness, or one that key people inside the organization have personally made or used.

Whether it’s web, app, IoT, AI, or XR, build costs are a burden for clients and, while not always satisfying for the agency, they are not small either. That’s what it means to run this as a business.

In the journey of a product making it to market, the place where enormous costs are actually spent is not the build — it’s operations.
Within operations, the largest costs go to acquiring and retaining customers.

Yet most so-called expert groups tackling 0-to-1 for the first time focus on building something cheaper, faster, bigger, and easier. The questions of who, when, where, how, for what reason someone chooses a specific product among so many others, how they use it, and what they do after their pain point is resolved — those tend to be treated as merely idealistic or as an unknowable domain.

Just like the tastiest kimchi stew in the world is meaningless if customers never reach the restaurant, or if they do arrive but have no intention or ability to pay for it — unless you’re building a portfolio piece only you can use or a free public-good shareware, you need the will to develop expertise not in your own or the organization’s accumulated experience (know-how), but in how to add to the customer’s experience.