I’ve worked on my fair share of products that didn’t quite make it. The process for coming up with ideas for them was always the same: Sit at home, think of things people might willingly pay for, choose one, and run with it. Unsurprisingly, this formula didn’t work, and even though I learned something new with each attempt, I can hardly say it was worth my time or money.
Then something surprising happened: I built a successful product without planning to—through a side project I'd taken on a little reluctantly. In retrospect, it's clear to me why my intentional, sit-down-and-brainstorm approach was less successful than this accidental one.
