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Introducing our new product - Revealing facts behind strategy
Hey everyone,
This is Ömer, Co-Founder of Mountain Labs. I’m excited to announce our new product. Meet ODAK. It’s a Co2 detector that notifies people when air quality is poor enough to affect your brain’s cognitive activities. It’s not just a Co2 detector, it comes with a built-in time-boxing feature and an LED that notifies people around about your dedicated work session.
This is how it looks so far 👇
It’s been a while since I was in discovery mode about what direction I should take in terms of product development. What I’ve noticed is building products based on market trends, shooting several products then checking what sticks, so-called indie hacking is not my style.
I believe it’s very valuable to confront the market as soon as possible and yes iterating over products and features is essential. But all should go within a strategy.
This quote put a bullet in my mind.
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
Sun Tzu - Art of War
To create a strategy, I had to find what comes along with me consistently throughout my journey. My first end-to-end product development engagement was in 2016, it was a B2C hardware product that was delivered to hundreds of houses.
I made a B2C2B (no spelling mistake here) SaaS attempt back in 2018 called patronai, which was a painful failure, to be honest. I explained what happened before in my previous blog posts.
Then Norland in 2021, a B2C software product for individuals to tell stories about their work. It has more than 2K users now. It is facing challenges with monetization nowadays.
As you can see all of my attempts somehow connect with B2C. But what I noticed software world is getting more crowded day by day.
Software business turned into an equation between the platform provider’s fee, budget for ad providers, and your profit. Building a software product is relatively easy but marketing it becoming more difficult day by day.
Your product is shown to people as much as “they” allow and/or as much as you keep paying them.
On the other side, hardware product involves different daemons. Although pretty same equations can be applied to HW products, an HW product does not need a screen always to be presented to more people. Especially after a certain amount of delivery, your products can be seen around without requiring any ad platform or marketplace.
On the other side, hardware products involve tons of challenges and bring different types of dependencies to manufacturers, component providers, and e-commerce platforms as well. There is always some trade-off.
After all, a physical product helps you build a deeper connection with users that’s what I love most perhaps.
Also as a brand (Mountain Labs), we want to serve a persona who is aware of attention games in the tech world and tries to avoid it, prioritizing life, loved ones, and nature over spending hours, weeks, or even years while doom scrolling. This helps me as a co-founder and my team to match and align our personal and professional commitments.
I can’t deny the effect of my experience in building hardware products too. That gives a certain level of confidence.
These are the more or less feelings and thoughts that pulled me into hardware.
Anyway, I hope you got some new perspectives while reading this post. If you want to check more about the product visit our website mountainlabs.io
If you want to get sincere thoughts and witness our journey while building products, don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter!
Thanks
Ömer,
Mountain Labs