The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use. That lets you design what you know—and you’ll figure out immediately whether or not what you’re making is any good.

But that path to figuring that out wasn’t easy. Here’s Ofstad’s advice for fellow horizontal product builders:

1. Double down on early traction (carefully).

2. Blend the functional and the aspirational.

3. Map out your adoption.

4. Think about pricing as positioning early on.

Our product simply is what we set out to build. However, the road from an idea to a market-ready product is rarely a straight line. After we have an idea of what we want to create—a better email app, a faster database or a yummier chocolate cake—we go through a process of building prototypes, or ugly first versions, that we put in front of prospect