一等公民 二等公民_使您的产品成为一流的公民

一等公民 二等公民

There was a great deal of interesting discussion last week based around a few blog posts. It started with a post on Medium entitled, The Myth of the Design Studio Turned Product Company written by Richard Banfield. Richard believes that the story of 37Signals, “unknowingly started the mythology that every design or development studio should become a product company” and concludes his article saying,

上周围绕一些博客帖子进行了很多有趣的讨论。 它以Richard菲尔德（Richard Banfield）撰写的有关Medium的帖子开头，名为Design Studio Turned Product Company的神话 。 理查德（Richard）相信37Signals的故事“在不知不觉中开始了每个设计或开发工作室都应该成为产品公司的神话”，并在他的文章中总结道：

“As 37Signals releases yet another book and another great new product I’m reminded that I still haven’t got round to finishing my first book. They are truly productive and inspirational. Their business story is also a big distraction for firms like ours. I’ll continue to read their awesome books and use their thoughtful products but you can keep mythology.”
- The Myth of the Design Studio Turned Product Company

“当37Signals发行又一本书和另一款出色的新产品时，我想起，我仍然没有办法完成我的第一本书。 他们是真正富有成效和鼓舞人心的。 他们的商业故事对像我们这样的公司来说也是一个很大的干扰。 我将继续阅读他们的精彩书籍并使用他们周到的产品，但您可以保留神话。”
- 设计工作室变成产品公司的神话

The best thing about that article however is the rebuttals that it inspired from experienced product people. In 37Signals isn’t mythical, you’re not paying attention Amy Hoy deconstructs the original post describing a history of the success of 37Signals far more closely aligned to my own memories of that time. I still remember the early work 37Signals were doing back when they were a client services business. Their clean style was in contrast to the chopped up images look of many of the sites of the time. Back then I still had some idea of being a web designer, and was inspired by their work.

然而，关于该文章的最好的事情是它是从经验丰富的产品人员那里得到的反驳。 在《 37Signals不是神话》中，您不会引起注意， Amy Hoy解构了原始帖子，该帖子描述了37Signals的成功历史，与我当时的记忆紧密相关。 我仍然记得37Signals从事客户服务业务时所做的早期工作。 他们整洁的风格与当时许多地点的切碎图像外观形成鲜明对比。 那时，我仍然有成为网页设计师的想法，并且受到他们工作的启发。

I love the post from Allan Branch of Less Accounting There’s No Myth, Only Years Of Hard Work because it describes the long game that is launching a product, especially if you do it as part of an existing business. It is going to create conflicts of interest; it probably will mean working longer hours and needing to work on the product outside of your normal hours. Allan responds to the “myth” that It’s easy to go from client services to products by saying,

我喜欢少会计艾伦分公司的帖子， 没有神话，只有多年的辛勤工作，因为它描述了发布产品的漫长过程，特别是如果您将其作为现有业务的一部分进行开发。 这将造成利益冲突； 这可能意味着需要更长的工作时间，并且需要在正常工作时间之外使用该产品。 艾伦（Allan）回应了一个“神话”，即从客户服务到产品都很容易，他说：

“It’s really really really hard. As you’re selling client services you’re also marketing and building a product, so you’re basically working two jobs. You’re promoting two company offerings, the product and the consultancy. In your brain you’re working through two problem spaces, juggling and assessing opportunities for two company, all without going insane or broke first.”
- There’s No Myth, Only Years Of Hard Work

“这真的非常非常困难。 当您销售客户服务时，您也在营销和构建产品，因此您基本上在从事两项工作。 您正在宣传两种公司产品，即产品和咨询服务。 在您的大脑中，您正在处理两个问题空间，杂耍和评估两家公司的机会，而这一切并没有发疯或先破产。”
- 没有神话，只有多年的努力

我们的经验 (Our experience)

As I’m currently writing a book about developing a product business as a side project, I obviously do believe it is possible to create successful product businesses alongside freelance or agency work. I also have personal experience of doing this, with our own product.

当我目前正在写一本关于将产品业务作为副项目进行开发的书时 ，我显然确实相信有可能与兼职或代理工作一起创建成功的产品业务。 我也有使用我们自己的产品进行此操作的个人经验。

With Perch it took us four years to go from the point of being a consultancy to the point where we could state that we do not take on client work any more. During that time we slowly moved from Perch being a tiny part of our working week, and a tiny part of our income to it taking up more and more of our time – while at the same time representing more of our income. Perch was paying its way.

有了Perch ，我们花了四年的时间从​​成为咨询公司到可以声明不再承担客户工作。 在那段时间里，我们从Perch慢慢变成了工作周的一小部分，从收入的一小部分转移到了Perch，这占用了我们越来越多的时间，同时又代表了我们更多的收入。 鲈鱼付出了代价。

The hardest part was when we hit a 50/50 split between client work and Perch work. We were at a point where we had decided that we would really love to be purely a product business, yet we still had major projects in hand. These projects were enjoyable and profitable but they pulled our focus away from our own product. By this point we were also dealing with a lot of technical support for Perch, and as developers dealing with those interruptions was hard.

最难的部分是当我们在客户工作和Perch工作之间达到50/50的分配时。 我们当时已经决定，我们真的很希望成为纯粹的产品业务，但我们仍在进行重大项目。 这些项目既有趣又有利可图，但它们使我们的注意力从我们自己的产品上移开了。 到那时，我们还为Perch提供了许多技术支持，并且开发人员很难处理这些中断。

It is important that, if you want to go into the product business, you do so with your eyes open and understand the amount of work and timescales you can expect. However I believe that for us there were some major factors in being able to make the transition in a relatively straightforward way.

重要的是，如果您要从事产品业务，请睁大眼睛并了解可以预期的工作量和时间表。 但是，我认为对于我们来说，能够以相对简单的方式进行过渡有一些主要因素。

我们从小开始 (We started small)

The initial version of Perch took about four weekends to build. It was new code, however it stood on the shoulders of a lot of experience in building custom CMS products. We spent about the same amount of time on infrastructure to actually deliver and support it. No distraction, or endless hours of work poured into the idea.

Perch的初始版本花了大约四个周末来构建。 它是新的代码，但是它在构建定制CMS产品方面经验丰富。 我们在基础架构上花费了几乎相同的时间来实际交付和支持它。 这个想法丝毫没有干扰，也没有无休止的工作量。

Our initial goal was to sell a copy a day. If that is all we had ever achieved Perch would have still been bringing in each year an amount of money equal to one of our decent sized client projects. We saw that as a realistic goal and one that would make a difference to our business.

我们最初的目标是每天出售一份副本。 如果这是我们所能实现的一切，Perch每年仍将获得相当于我们一个体面的客户项目之一的资金。 我们将其视为一项现实目标，并将对我们的业务产生影响。

我们选择了切合实际的定价模型，以使产品与客户工作一起成为一流的公民 (We chose a realistic pricing model to enable the product to be a first class citizen alongside client work)

Once Perch was making money we treated it like a client project. We knew what we had to bring in each month to survive as a business, and so if we were to spend a day a week on Perch, it needed to be bringing in that amount of profit. We had been very deliberate in selecting our pricing model for Perch to be sure that if it became a success it would make us money. With a self-hosted CMS, with a target market of designers who might be new to PHP, we knew we would be getting a reasonable amount of support.

一旦Perch获利，我们就将其视为客户项目。 我们知道我们每个月要带来的收入才能生存下来，因此，如果我们每周花一天时间在Perch上度过一天，它需要带来那么多利润。 我们一直在为Perch选择定价模型时非常谨慎，以确保如果成功，它将为我们赚钱。 通过自托管的CMS ，针对可能是PHP新手的设计人员的目标市场，我们知道我们将获得合理的支持。

我们理想的客户已经在关注我们 (Our ideal customers were already following us)

The ideal customer we had in mind for Perch was a freelance designer or developer, or a small agency. Both Drew and I have been writing books and articles for web designers, and speaking at industry conferences for years. To market Perch initially we just had to tell people what we were doing. There was a level of trust already that if we were doing something, it would be of a certain quality.

我们想到Perch的理想客户是自由设计师或开发人员，或小型代理商。 我和Drew都在为网页设计师撰写书籍和文章，并在行业会议上发表演讲已有多年。 要开始销售Perch，我们只需要告诉人们我们在做什么。 已经有一定的信任度，如果我们正在做某事，那将具有一定的质量。

As Allan wisely notes,

正如艾伦明智地指出的那样，

“Spend five hours on the HackerNews front page and get a few thousand uniques from the most cynical, judgmental visitors you can imagine.”

“在HackerNews头版上花五个小时，从您能想象的最愤世嫉俗，有判断力的访客那里获得数千个独特之处。”

In comparison our early customers knew and trusted us. They were friendly and excited to help us improve the product, rather than judgmental and looking for problems. Those early customers helped us to validate the idea, come up with the next set of features and also spread the word. Marketing to your own tribe takes a lot less time and money.

相比之下，我们的早期客户了解并信任我们。 他们很友好，很兴奋，可以帮助我们改进产品，而不是凭判断和寻找问题。 那些早期的客户帮助我们验证了这一想法，提出了下一组功能并广为宣传。 对自己的部落进行营销所花费的时间和金钱要少得多。

这对我们现有的业务很有用 (It was useful in our existing business)

As Amy points out, 37Signals were using Basecamp to enhance their business in the early days,

正如艾米（Amy）所指出的那样，37Signals在早期使用Basecamp来扩展业务，

“Basecamp was a competitive advantage for 37signals: The Consultants. And they turned that into a product for other people in their audience.” –

“大本营是37signals的竞争优势：顾问。 他们把它变成了受众中其他人的产品。” –

Perch acted in the same way for us. The initial idea had come to us because clients were asking for something to use for their smaller projects, rather than the bigger CMS framework we had developed for the large, custom jobs. Even if Perch had not taken off as a product we would have still had it to enhance our business. No time would have been wasted in building it.

鲈鱼对我们的行为也一样。 最初的想法是给我们的，因为客户要求一些东西用于他们的较小项目，而不是我们为大型定制工作开发的较大CMS框架。 即使Perch并没有作为一种产品脱颖而出，我们仍然会拥有它来增强我们的业务。 建造它不会浪费时间。

我们建立系统 (We set up systems)

We had a helpdesk in place right from the start, rather than ending up with everything pouring into our email clients. We made great use of the APIs offered by PayPal and our accounting package Xero. We developed a process of trying to design support requests out of the product, instead of spending time helping people in support we thought it better to try and stop that issue occurring.

我们从一开始就提供了一个服务台，而不是将一切都倾倒到我们的电子邮件客户端中。 我们充分利用了PayPal提供的API和我们的会计软件包Xero。 我们开发了一种尝试从产品中设计支持请求的过程，而不是花时间帮助人们提供支持，我们认为最好尝试阻止该问题的发生。

When I talk about this, people often assume creating process is just for big teams. However even if you are a team of one, having a process means you don’t waste any time deciding what to do. It also means you are ready to scale and add team members if things suddenly take off.

当我谈到这一点时，人们通常会认为创建过程仅适用于大型团队。 但是，即使您是一个团队，拥有一个流程也意味着您不会浪费任何时间来决定要做什么。 这也意味着如果事情突然发生，您已经准备好扩展规模并添加团队成员。

这需要工作。 需要花时间。 (It will take work. It will take time.)

Launching a product of any sort is going to involve work. It could become a dangerous distraction to your core business.However, if you are already running an agency or freelance business you have project management skills, you know how to work to a budget. Treat your product as a first class citizen in that mix and you can grow a successful product business as a consultancy.

推出任何种类的产品都将涉及工作。 这可能会分散您的核心业务的危险，但是，如果您已经在经营代理机构或自由职业者，那么您就有项目管理技能，那么您就会知道如何按预算进行工作。 在这种组合中将您的产品视为头等公民，您可以作为咨询公司发展成功的产品业务。

翻译自: https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2013/11/11/making-your-product-a-first-class-citizen/

一等公民 二等公民