Thank god someone made this product!

That's how I felt when Apple announced they were going to come out with the iPhone back in 2007. Thank God!

I remember the years leading up to that. I was begging that they'd enter the market. I tried all of the top-of-the-line Nokia phones. I remember the N95 being a particular disappointment. It was hyped as being so cool - 5 megapixel camera, fancy design, fancy OS … but it sucked. It took forever for it to launch the camera, the build was cheap and nasty, it was just such a disappointment.

When the iPhone finally came out, I had a friend buy it for me in New York and FedEx it to me in Copenhagen. We just missed the 1.1.1 version, and mine was the 1.1.2, which had something fixed so it wasn't so easy to jailbreak the carrier settings. For the first several months I couldn't get it working with a SIM-card in Denmark, so I just used it as a glorified iPod Touch. I carried my iPhone AND my horrible Nokia phone at all times.

Only a few months later, in December of 2007, was there an option. Some company in Eastern Europe made a device that you attached to your SIM-card, and which allowed you to reprogram it and make it say it was an AT&T SIM even though it wasn't. I bought that thing of course. You had to cut your SIM-card to make room for the device. Then you had to ssh into your phone and write some obscure commands. But lo and behold, we got the phone working. Amazing. And it was everything I'd hoped it would be, and so much more.

When creating products, that's what I want to shoot for. The feeling of "Thank God someone made this product!". If that's the feeling you evoke in your customers, then your life is going to be so much easier. Then marketing is easy, because you simply have to expose people to your product and maybe help the word-of-mouth along a little bit. And then you're golden.

Thank God someone created this product.

Why not shoot for that - every time?