On ideas of things, or Second Jacob's Law

What are bad products?

• Products parasiting on the problems caused by other products.
• Products based on misconception that they are the most important app on my phone.
• Products sending me push notifications with unclear and provocative messages just to make me consume more.
• Products hiding Unsubscribe button so far away that they literally torture their users by not letting them do what they want to.
• Products distorting usual patterns to manipulate metrics, like books apps landing me not on my book, and not even on my library, but on the feed with all the new books.

The saddest part is that often we can't just 'quit'. I personally struggle looking for simple services or actual events without Instagram: it's become a marketplace, a personal websites collection, an events poster. I can't know when my favourite café closes for technical reasons without always being connected to a reels plant.

What are the good ones though?

So what? Can't I provide a positive definition instead of saying what a good product can't be? I'll try.

I asked my LinkedIn connections about their favourite products but got only one answer from my friend mentioning Notion and Wikipedia. So I'd like to share some nice examples of products I'm actively using which are not universal ones, like Books or Notes:

Alfread

A cozy read-later app by Fedor Shkliarau.

Hevy

Just a reliable workout routines tracker. Hundreds of exercises, workout statistics that helps me progress in the gym. It even has s social media component that can be easily ignored.

ZenMoney

Spending tracker covers all things related to my finances. I prefer not to connect the bank cards directly, but even without it it covers everything my family needs to track.

Obsidian

This list wouldn't be complete without mentioning it. Although Obsidian is obviously not an app serving very specific purpose and is not open source, it contains almost everything I find important in what a program in my computer is supposed to look like: user-supported, local-first and highly customizable.

Any alternatives to pave the way out of crisis?

I'm not naïve and I know that people need to earn money to live, so they need to produce more, continuously generating value for shareholders. Without ever-growing cancer-like products, thousands of product managers will lose their jobs (and product designers too. Sorry).

But I won't be surprised if soon we find ourselves in the world, where the user will have to pay more to see less: customisable products with opportunity just not to see and not to engage in some parts of the product. This can become especially important in social media apps: how else can we choose between connection and algorithms?

There still are software developers that focus on creating good products, and even manage to earn profit without venture investments. For example, 37signals develop Hey, a non-typical email client, and Basecamp, project management app loved by many teams who just don't need Jira.

Another direction can become creating custom tools for the use of a very limited group of people – the development of AI-enhanced coding can help with it a lot (see barefoot developers).

(Imagine how bad things have become, if someone on Bluesky says it was much easier to develop a custom family planning tool than to find a good existing one.)

Aiming for an Ideal

I've spent a long time looking for an ideal bag, ideal trousers, ideal notebook, ideal pen. (Answers, correspondingly: no ideal bag found yet for a reasonable price, COS barrel leg cropped cotton pants, Moleskine Cahier, Lamy Safari). During searches, I found out that the object's proximity to the ideal is directly proportional to its cost or difficulty of obtaining it.

Making a good thing always requires a lot of effort and expertise of the people who are making this thing. Time spent on not just working on it, but creating and designing it with a lot of attention to the creator's taste and feeling that it's right, is expensive.

I believe that a good product aims to become an ideal solution of a very specific and serious problem. Not Platonic ideal, probably: in the world of 8 billion people you won't create an ideal messenger. But for a couple of millions of them, needing, for example, text messaging combined with community building — chances are high. Ideal means being just enough: not being excessive, but not being useless. Just being here when needed and first doing what's expected, second — doing it in an unexpectedly good way.

Conclusion

One fellow designer recently agreed with me: all good things are either expensive or hard to find. Almost always, it's both.

But he added: it's amazing that we can search and discover, plan and create those things — always seeking, always yearning for the ideal.