Forget the Shiny Tech, Focus on the Customer Experience

I'm always amazed when I discover a new piece of technology or software. Usually, thousands of business ideas start pouring into my head on how I can build a cool product. Most recently, the thought of Twilio, Mailgun, and Sendgrid came to mind.

An internal dialogue raged on in my mind:

"SMS and email are some of the most ubiquitous communication tools, not to mention very pervasive."

"What could I build quickly to monetize and spread virally?"

"Focus, you fool..."

"You're in the process of selling one company and you just started another. Plus, no one really cares about how you're using cool tech."

And then I dropped the thought.

This has happened to me time and time again. In fact, that's how Reflect7 was founded. I knew the iPhone would be hot. I knew that consumers would purchase them by the ton. I just didn't know what apps to develop for it yet. Eventually we settled on sports' apps, but we didn't consider the customer experience until the end.

I finally had this realization of all of this when I stumbled upon this video:

It was Steve Jobs who made it crystal clear as to what I had done. I was thinking a lot about the technology and how I could sell that, rather than consider customer problems and how I could build products that delivered a superb experience. This is what Gitpilot will do.