A product that no one needs?

The last 6 months were pure hell for a team of 4 young Croatians: we launched a true MVP of our online desktop PC configurator — Assemblio, we prepared and targeted only the local Croatian computer market, we had our first pitch, we felt our first wave of criticism, but also our first wave of praise.

In hindsight, we’ve heard a lot of different criticism, but this sums it up pretty good:

“You are 10 years late — no one needs your product today. The PC market is long dead… why are you building this?”

In all honesty, that’s probably one of the worst things you can hear as a young entrepreneur. It’s cruel, depressing but to us it was a surprising motivation to rethink everything we knew about our product. Or at least everything we thought we know.

We sat one day, discussing similar solutions like PCPartPicker.com and Pangoly, and as one thing led to another, we soon realized that the most of the community feedback we got was really positive. True, at that moment we didn’t have answers to questions like “How we are going to scale this?” and “How many PCs can we sell in Croatia?” but we realized we had something else:

a firm community of hardware enthusiasts, gamers and local tech influencers that strongly challenged us to deliver a platform that can help anyone buy the best PC for their budget

And what a challenge that is! The current Assemblio community (our early adopters and our followers) are not newbie computer users: they are tech savvy forum members, hardware enthusiasts and hardcore gamers.

Their problem is not how to build a good PC, they already know how to do it. Their problems come from the people who ask them to help them build a PC and from other forum members who often challenge them to build a better PC, and thus they lose a lot of time scraping through computer hardware magazines.

And that’s when we decided that we are not building just a product. We are building a platform for others to utilize for their own needs. The problem we tried to solve shifted: we were no longer only building the best PC for a given budget, we were now building tools that enable the hardcore users (our early adopters) to do that much much faster than they did it before.

This is what we what we realized want to make:

Someone builds a PC using Assemblio, sends you the link, you (an expert) tweak it a bit and send it back. The user clicks “buy” -> BANG! He get’s a preassembled PC shipped to his doorstep, containing only the very best of for your budget and usage.

The user gets an amazing PC, the expert gets street credit.