The Challenger Products Playbook

Let’s say you have a product concept. You are an outsider. How can you win?

Incumbents ape Apple: launch big, perfect, simple, closed, expensive.

Challengers rarely can.

Today, this is their rule book:

Embrace hackers.

Open source or bold dev platform.

Leak early.

Sexy pictures.

Challenge the big boys. Disrupt them on price. Go where they won’t.

Sell online before there is a product. Eg Kickstarter.

Ship to devs early.

Ship online next

Stores, someday.

Be a mission driven community not a product.

This is basically Pebbl or Ouya or many other gadgets of the last 2 years.

Is Google Glass like this? By releasing super duper early, Google is actually a sort of nerd underdog. They arent going to big bang #fail.

Nexus Q on the other hand…