Introduction
This is a list of the worst products of 2017.
This year I’ve had some terrible products come up for me on Product Hunt, which has become my go-to for new products to test. While I understand that these products are not perfect, they all fall down from my list and are yet another reminder that even the best product ideas can fail.
I hope this post will help you avoid the same pitfalls when you test your own ideas.
I would love to tell you about the worst products of 2017
The worst products of 2017 are often the products that I would pay top dollar for — assuming I’m not buying them from a friend. These include the following:
1)Google Home/Google Home Mini 2)Windows 10 for phones 3)BMW 5 series 4)Apple Watch 5)Dyson D7 6)Apple AirPods 7)Sennheiser H1s 8)Moto Z2 Force 9)iPhone X 10)Samsung Gear S3 11)Xiaomi Mi 6 12)Toms Shoes 13)Amazon Echo 14)iPad Air 2 15)iPhone SE 16)iPad Pro 17)Xiaomi Mi Mix 18-24 months old
But it’s not just these products, as many of these were also available at a price point that made them completely unacceptable (or, at least, they had better features than what was being offered at that price).
For example:
– iPhone X ($1000/$1500 after insurance), $999, $1400 or $1099 off-contract (the last one is pure garbage).
– Samsung Galaxy S8 ($650-700), $750 or $200 off-contract.
– Moto Z2 Force ($450-$500), $399 or $40 off contract.
While this is certainly a very large list and in most cases could be justified on one platform (Android vs iOS), it’s also quite telling that some of our favorite Android products did not make the top 10: Google Pixel and Pixel XL are still plenty good, but their pricing makes them sound like absolute garbage compared to Apple’s devices, especially when you consider there are no subsidies and they are more expensive than any Android phone today. It’s also notable how some of our favorite iOS devices don’t even make the list: iPad Pro, iPad mini 3 and iPhone SE are all great devices and they don’t exist in a market where they are priced higher than almost any other device on the market today. And then there is this one big catch: none of those above have anything to do with what we do here or what you need to build your startup if you want to be successful. However, we can all agree on how much we love all of those above products! They are simply beyond our reach!
These are the worst products of 2017
A while back while I was working on a big project at the time, I came across an article that showed that the worst products of 2017 were actually the best products of 2016. As I pondered — how did we get here? — I realized that this saying was more than just a phrase. It was a marketing strategy: to build businesses on the backs of other people’s ideas and passion. Not only was it a good idea, it had worked remarkably well for businesses like Snapchat and Medium.
There are no hard numbers or metrics available on this (other than from my own gut feelings), but it seems there are three simple rules for making your product worse:
1) No one will know about it unless you tell them about it.
2) If you tell anyone about it, they will hate you for it (assuming you have established credibility).
3) If you don’t tell anyone about it, no one will care enough to actually use your product because no one will care enough to try it (assuming you have not yet established credibility).
My friends at Medium are in the first category; they have done an amazing job building their brand around what they call “the platform as a product” and they do love being criticized by their customers (and vice versa). However, as successful as Medium is right now, I suspect most of these criticisms were based on personal biases rather than actual proof; more likely, there is some evidence of user adoption but no real feedback data to show how successful Medium has been relative to its competitors. On the flip side, when Medium started out with what they called “the platform as a product” and built up their customer base over several years via word-of-mouth — then another way of doing things never occurred to them until someone made an issue out of it.
The second category is Snapchat. The company has been around for years but everyone who used Snapchat didn’t know that because Snapchat isn’t designed for sharing photos or videos with others but rather for making private messages by clapping your fingers over the screen so that everybody in range can see what you say without seeing their faces or hearing them talking. This method works great when nobody is watching but if you want your friends and family to see what you say, then people need to be able to see your face so your finger must come off the screen before they can read what you say. There are many ways around this
Conclusion
In a year where product launches were increasingly notable, many of the worst products made their way onto the list. But this isn’t to say that there isn’t room for improvement on the product side:
1. This could have been a better summary of the worst products in 2017
2. We didn’t include projects that are being actively developed now (i.e. not yet released).
3. Some categories did not make it beyond the first five — we’ve got a lot of work left to do for those!
4. The A-Holes category has been expanded to include more categories from our own catalog, and we will look at adding some new ones as soon as they become available (and as long as they don’t get too long!).
5. We will be adding “worst apps” to our yearly post in 2018 too! You can sign up here to receive an email when they are posted ?