Borders

Some days I go into book stores without any intention of buying a book.

Why? I won’t lie to you, it’s the coffee.

For someone who spends their days breathing bits and bytes, there is nothing more relaxing to me than sitting on a comfortable couch with a delicious, overpriced stimulant (even though all I drink is decaf these days) surrounded by the words of clever people. It gives me time to think about what’s really important, and inevitably my thoughts stumble back to one question –why in the world does every book store on the planet have a barrister?

Maybe it has something to do with this.

In the last week, I went to Borders twice. The first time it was to buy a book, unfortunately it wasn’t in stock. My heart was broken. What they did have, however, was the Cocoa Trio — a Holiday specialty drink that I will only describe as one of the best versions of hot chocolate I have ever tried. I left the store sad that I didn’t get my book, but extraordinarily happy that I’d stopped by the coffee hutch.

The next day, I came back to the store to try the Cocoa Trio again and who would believe it — my book had arrived. In sum, Border’s sold me $15 worth of books and $6 worth of drinks all because they understood the cardinal rule of building platforms — remember your secondary draw.

It’s critical to focus on what you’re good at, whether you’re a Social Network trying to bring together like-minded users or a web application trying to heal over a customer’s point of pain. It’s so critical, in fact, that many entrepreneurs ignore the fact that almost as important as “what you do best” are those things that you do really, really well.

  • Facebook has a great photo album.
  • Twitter is a good way track people down at events.
  • Gmail is a great organizational tool.

While none of these are the primary reasons people use these products, the fact that clever entrepreneurs have put so much effort into driving these ideas home through secondary applications (GTDInbox / Britekite) has only encouraged people to see these tools in a new light. More importantly, it has encouraged people to use these tools for new reasons.

You can’t build a new product every day, but you can always reimagine your existing one. If you find yourself saturating the market that you believe your idea speaks to, take a step back and consider what else it does well. Look at your users and see how they are actually using your product. If you find that people are already sitting in your couches, reading your books and taking up your floor space, make sure that you have something for them to do with their hands while they do it; If you find that people just love to use your ToDo list to keep track of their weekly shopping, make it dead simple for shopaholics to dive into your software.

More often than you’d expect, a successful product is not the one that does a single thing perfectly but the one that does several related things really, really well.

What’s your secondary draw?

(Images)

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