Hello,
This is Oleg, CEO and co-founder of GoPractice.
Why demand outweighs quality
Recently, Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of HubSpot, put into words something many product people tend to overlook.
For new projects, “strong demand, weak product” is a better starting point than “strong product, weak demand.”
Demand gives you room to iterate. You can improve a mediocre product if users are actively trying to solve a problem and are pulling for a solution. But generating demand from scratch is much harder.
Problem ⇒ Product vs. Demand ⇒ Product
I had a conversation with an entrepreneur who has launched dozens of products. He mentioned that early in his career, the success rate of his projects was significantly higher.
The reason: he used to start by validating demand. He would identify it, test distribution channels, and only then build the product. Over time, his approach shifted into building around user problems and checking the demand only afterward.
Product managers often focus too much on the product itself. When they describe what they’re working on, they talk about jobs-to-be-done, user value, elegant solutions. But validation of demand, finding scalable acquisition channels, and building viable unit economics are frequently left out of the picture.
That’s a critical mistake today. Distribution has become the riskiest and most constrained part of launching a new product. Thanks to AI and no-code tools, building the product is no longer the bottleneck. Capturing attention is.
The skill to identify demand signals, get through the noise, and deliver value to users through the right channels has become the key.
Now, a company with an average product but a great understanding of working with demand and distribution has a better chance of success than one with a great product but no traction. The ideal case, of course, is being good at both.
Demand is unevenly distributed
Here’s the thing about demand — it’s never evenly distributed.
You can clearly see this on TikTok. Take any niche (say, parenting) and look at four or five popular accounts. Most of their content performs at an average level, and only a few posts go viral. And the topics of these hits tend to overlap across accounts.
Those recurring hit topics are where demand is currently concentrated.
When developing a new product, focus on demand hotspots, places where interest is already evident. Find them through social media trends, ad testing, and user feedback.
In paid marketing, creative teams routinely test hundreds of hypotheses per month. The goal is to find the few that resonate 10x better than the rest. And in my experience, that’s the right approach. If teams were to build based on what they personally liked, a lot of products would probably never get launched.
Demand is a lot like magic in Game of Thrones. It doesn’t operate everywhere equally. There are specific places where the magic happens. If you find those places, you can channel your product through them.
Learn with GoPractice
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All the best,
Oleg
