I started my journey of building digital products about three years ago. It was not a straight path. I realized an important principle about impactful products: _no matter how good of an engineering solution you might have, it can all be a waste if you're not building something worthwhile._ What to build is often more difficult than how. But first, let's define 'worthwhile'– what does that even mean?

I'd define something 'worthwhile' as having some economic value – something someone would pay for. Or, something someone would use every single day or frequently. If taken away, they would find an alternative way to fulfil that need.

> _Software is this weird space where you can spend basically nothing and create a billion dollars of value, or spend a billion dollars and create basically no value. –_ [François Chollet](https://twitter.com/fchollet)

Impactful products usually possess an important key trait – simplicity. It's much harder to take a complex solution and turn it into a product that's simple to use. The complexity almost blends and hides behind the elegance of this simplicity. There is a general sense of lacking and emptiness. But when examined closely, there also exists a sense of perfection. It feels simple yet whole.

The process of attempting to build impactful products almost always requires iteration. And, trying to optimize for perfection tends to impede this process. Counterintuitively, I believe iteration is a prerequisite for perfection. Aiming for perfection before iteration can hinder this ultimate goal at hand. That said, one area of perfection is worth aiming for: _the core functionality –_ solving the core problem in the simplest way that works. The rest is in the hands of iteration.

A few words on learning to build digital products

On Impactful Products



#### Asynchronous

It doesn't cause interruption. One can check their messages without interrupting what they are doing. They can address them in their own time. Businesses can also benefit from the lack of interruption in their workflows. Respects everybody's time.

#### Attention

Texts get read. With more than a 90% open rate,  text messaging is a daily part of life for many consumers. They use it to communicate with their loved ones, friends, acquaintances, and coworkers.

#### Friction

Because people use it in their day-to-day, they are familiar with it. There's no learning curve; it's natural and habitual. It's integrated with their other devices – it's accessible.

#### Commerce

It creates opportunities to increase sales. What might start as a conversation, a question, or a concern, could end up in a sale. Information exchange over text can lead to tangible invitations to purchase or offer a service.

#### Engagement

It leads to enhanced engagement. Builds a channel for promoting products, services, or loyalty. Customer relations become one text away. Opens up opportunities to do more than just communicate – upsell, retarget, or educate.

Here's why I think business messaging is underrated

On Business Messaging


An influential business concept I've learned:

Starbucks doesn't sell coffee – it offers the experience of relaxing and recharging.

Amazon doesn't sell stuff – it offers the experience of buying things.

The 'thing' being sold is somewhat incidental.

h/t: @dharmesh

The 'Thing' Being Sold


**Key Insights**

A book about network effects attempts to answer the question: How to use network effects to scale a product?

What is a network effect? It's what happens when a product gets more valuable as more people use it. A telephone inherently has no value until there's someone on the other line to call.

It was mainly used in B2C but has increasingly become more relevant in B2B apps as well. Slack or Notion is more useful as more people use it.

Meerkat's Law: Meerkats, being hypersocial animals, benefit from living together. The value of being a Meerkat goes up as more of them join the crew. But, overpopulation can cause a collapse.

There's a tipping point where resources become exhausted.

The Cold Start Problem – getting the right people and content on the platform at the same time. For instance, Slack is only useful when at least 3 people are using it on a team.

Tipping Point – as a new network comes online, it becomes easier to build and scale the subsequent one. There's a dominos effect, aka momentum.

Escape Velocity – a phase when a product starts to scale and tap into the benefits of the networks for further growth and scale.

The Moat – companies can use "Network-Based Competition" to develop a moat around their business. Large networks tend to have stronger moats. Smaller networks usually end up picking niches and building atomic networks that can be highly defensible.

So what exactly is 'The Cold Problem'?

It's a problem of starting up the network – where you start with a single network and fight against the negative forces that could drive the network to zero.

To solve this problem, you need the right people on the network. For example, 10 people using Slack from the same team is better than 10 random people. Density and interconnectedness are important.

Startups can start and grow in a small market, which makes them dangerous competitors. These markets tend to be insignificant for larger companies.

Original text: [The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen](https://a16z.com/book/the-cold-start-problem/)

The Cold Start Problem


#### Iteration

This is probably one of the most important concepts when it comes to product development and engineering. It can be quite overwhelming to start on something and make it good – which can sometimes cause paralysis to even get started. The idea of perfectionism impedes us from putting out the first version. Iteration is not only helpful for getting started, but also for making something better. Every time we thought our current version is the best, the next iteration turned out to be much better – always.

#### Distribution

I learned about distribution very recently. Initially, I thought it was mostly about building a good product. After learning about how some of the most successful companies had gotten off the ground, distribution seems to have played an important role. The concept of distribution could be tied to manually recruiting the initial set of customers ([a good essay by PG on this](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)) or having some sort of a hack to somehow get that initial set of customers. Paid advertising is usually not it – at least initially.

#### Growth

The umbrella term for this could be – marketing. However, it seems that 'growth' is much more than that. It seems to be an artistic mix of integrating different APIs to track and measure user behaviour with finding ways to get exposure by building certain aspects in the product itself. Sean Ellis has a good book on this, called [Hacking Growth](https://www.amazon.ca/Hacking-Growth-Fastest-Growing-Companies-Breakout/dp/045149721X). Growth, in an early-stage startup context, could mean a special kind of referral program for instance, where the cost of acquiring new customers is significantly low. Dropbox is a good example of this – where their referral program included extra storage instead of money, which was significantly cheap for Dropbox.

#### Design

Before truly dabbling into the world of design, I thought it essentially meant 'pretty'. It's definitely much more than that. There are elements of the UI being aesthetically pleasing, but so much goes behind the scenes from a usability standpoint – or at least it should. It is a nuanced expression of emotion, where the placement of every little thing elicits a certain conscious or subconscious reaction. This, in turn, could play an immensely important role in getting somebody to use a product.

#### Engineering

Sometimes engineering problems are exciting to solve, which can lead to over-engineering. This could become more of an issue while debugging or adding new functionality. More specifically – we ran into issues like doing high-level [abstraction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(computer_science)) much early on without specific future use cases in mind. This inevitably leads to more complexity. We also chose consistency over utility for certain engineering implementations, which limited our overall development. We learnt that sometimes utility should take precedence over consistency – essentially, the standardization should evolve around the utility.

#### Simplicity

The most widely used products are very simple. Regardless of how complex a solution might be, the elegance of it only shines through the simplicity of its delivery. [Aaron Levie](https://twitter.com/levie) has some [good tweets](https://twitter.com/levie/status/1441422969813696517?s=20) on this topic. It was another reminder of how _less is more._ Getting to simplicity is quite difficult. It requires much more cognitive effort and creativity to remove stuff than to just add.

#### Motivation

Managing personal motivation requires constant work. Because the process of trying to build something from scratch is so precarious, not every moment feels motivational. This is where having a sense of long-term ambitions and vision helps. Although it might even sound ridiculous at the moment, it could serve the purpose of reigniting motivation. Day in, day out the progress feels slow; accumulation over weeks or months could be quite surprising though. Either way, _laying one brick a day_ is usually the most productive use of time and probably the best predictor of any kind of progress or success.

#### Patience

Building a new product or concept usually takes longer than expected. There seems to be a lot of trial and error, and hypothesis testing that happens during the process. Some things work and others we learn from. This process of trying to find a solution for a pain point involves patience. It could feel discouraging at times, but this process seems inevitable in order to find something that works.

#### Stories

Learning about how companies got started and the challenges they faced in their early stages has helped me the most. It provides perspective on what it takes to go through the process of building something. While the nuances of challenges may differ, there seem to be general mental models or mental frames that are worth noting. One such mental model is pivoting, for example.

#### Focus

In the early stages, it is difficult to tackle everything at once given the lack of resources. It seems obvious in retrospect. This is when ambitious goals might be distracting. Picking up one thing and doing it well for a small subset of users seems to be much more important than trying to do everything at once.

Thoughts on building products and startups

10 Startup Lessons in 2021


Last year in December, I had the opportunity to visit Amazon Headquarters in Seattle, WA. What they have created over the last decade is absolutely stunning and mind-blowing. While they were still testing out their Amazon Go store for their employees (and I had the opportunity to explore it as well), one of the biggest yet simple revelations I had was “the future is approaching faster than you may think”. They are truly revolutionizing the current state of the retail industry, which also includes community pharmacy.

There have been numerous emerging articles over the past 6 months speculating how Amazon could invade/revolutionize the pharmacy retail industry. A simple truth that sometimes may be overlooked is that Amazon sells convenience and time. While one might argue that the healthcare industry is relatively more complex and requires Amazon to overcome the loops of legality (which is true), history has shown repeatedly that ‘Amazon disrupting industries’ has been successful even when the odds were against them. This is a company that once set an agenda to digitize every book in print.

A few ways Amazon has been speculated to transform the pharmacy industry include enormous shipping power, buying cheap generics, turning “Whole Foods into Whole Drugs”,  buy into the pharmacy business, or launch their own startup. Amazon has already recently launched the “Basic Care” OTC Line of products on Amazon.com as of August 2017, with product inventory categorized into allergy/cold/cough, antihistamines, analgesics, children’s, digestive, feminine hygiene, hair growth, pain, and stop smoking. Not only do they offer these products (aka, convenience), their platforms are accompanied with infographics showcasing the drugs. For instance, the allergy/cold page has infographics showing the differences between allergy and cold symptoms. Given the current magnitude of their technology, they could easily add a symptom checker on their platform to provide recommendations as they are selling these products. That being said, there will always be a need for ‘brick-and-mortar’ stores for people looking for immediate relief (unless they provide one-hour delivery to their patients as they do one-hour wine delivery).

Amazon is already selling medical supplies and equipment to clinics and hospitals. Amazon cloud service is currently competing and pitching to healthcare customers to store healthcare-related data. The company has also recently partnered up with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway to launch a healthcare company for their employees. Amazon has partnered up with Merck to inspire Alexa (their voice identification system similar to Apple’s Siri) to help diabetic patients manage their condition.

A pharmacy branch manager in England wrote: “Everyone should be scared of Amazon encroaching into the pharmacy business. With a powerhouse of logistical expertise and experience, there is a real competitive threat to the sector.” Another politician wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister in the UK recommending: “… I would like the community pharmacy market to follow trends we have witnessed in other retail markets. This might include a shift away from the traditional brick-and-mortar business model towards scaled-up, innovative supply solutions employing digital technology, where Government expenditure is minimized.” And the Government expenditure minimization would obviously be a huge driving factor.

While technology might be ‘cool’ and reveal possibilities of replacing pharmacists or revolutionizing healthcare (dispensing medications in particular), the majority of people still prefer the ‘human touch’ when it comes to their medications. A survey of 1000 people by the National Pharmacy Association revealed that 93% of the older people are against the shift towards digital online pharmacy retailers. The percentage dropped to 69% when spread across individuals of all ages. However, that being said, as technology becomes more mainstream in the current ageing generation, a shift towards digital online pharmacies is inevitable. While this threatens the traditional business model of community pharmacies, it also opens new doors for new opportunities and innovations.

While Amazon’s definite move into healthcare industry is unclear, however, if it does decide to invade community pharmacy, a significant portion of the lower-end market will likely be affected. That includes pharmacies relying heavily on dispensing services where ‘Amazonization’ is easily implementable. On the other hand, pharmacies that rely more heavily on other revenue streams where face-to-face interaction is required will likely be less affected. That being said, we need to take initiative to evolve our profession amidst the technology revolution and preserve our value in healthcare.

Just some observations on technology and pharmacy