“Make it high quality.”
Cool. But… what does that actually mean?
Or even better: “Quality over quantity”. Okay, I get it (I’ve only heard that phrase like 3000 times), but how do I really do that?
Ask five people what makes a product “high quality” and you’ll get five completely different answers. For some, it’s flawless performance. For others, it’s how it makes you feel.
And for an entrepreneur? It might just be whatever keeps the complaints low and the positive reviews high.
The truth is: there are multiple definitions of product quality — and not all of them might be right for your business.
In this article, we’ll break down five of the most common ways people define product quality, explain how each one works, and help you figure out which lens to apply based on what you’re building and who you’re building it for.
Super high-quality article 😉.
This is the “you know it when you see it” quality. This doesn’t necessarily imply you need the best specs or the best functionalities.
We’ll come to that a little later.
The transcendent approach simply means you need to WOW your customers or clients. Of course, this can be done with amazing specs, but you can also do something else…
… and that is packaging your product or service in a special way.
Make people think: “No way they went THAT far.”
Here are a couple of examples of transcendent quality:
If you want your product or service to feel premium, that’s what you have to do. And this SUCH good advice, because nobody does these things.
Follow my advice and stand out in your market.
I’m talking about my Startup Launch Roadmap eBook.
It’s designed to show you everything you need to know about creating a business plan, designing a product, attracting investments, and launching it.
If you’re a founder, this book will help you SO much. You can get it here:
If you’re actively asking yourself this question… good job!
You’re on the right track, for it is those who constantly improve their solution that dominate their industry.
Ask yourself: “What features can I objectively increase or improve that my customers care about?”
Relentlessly improve. If you haven’t been asking yourself this question and constantly iterating, you might have fallen ill with the Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
No, it’s not a disease.
The official definition is:
A cognitive bias wherein persons of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is.
Basically, this means you suck, but you convinced yourself you’re amazing.
source: https://graphpaperdiaries.com/2017/08/20/the-real-dunning-kruger-graph/
You’re ALWAYS paid proportionally to the value you can bring to other people. So keep making your product faster, better, more attractive.
The beauty of this approach is that it’s objective. You can benchmark against industry standards.
You can A/B test your changes.
But the trap here is assuming that all buyers make decisions based on specs…
They don’t! More often, it’s about both logic AND emotions.
Only use this ‘logical’ lens if your customers care about the numbers, and understand them.
There is also a very subjective component to quality.
After all, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. It’s not what’s objectively “better”, but what feels tailor-made.
This is the Netflix “For You” experience, or when a customer says, “It’s like you read my mind.”
This is where user interviews, customer feedback, and deep empathy matter most.
If your offer doesn’t make your ideal customer feel like it was designed just for them, then it doesn’t qualify as “high quality” under this lens.
You won’t be able to please everyone with this approach to quality… Only a very small piece of the market with some very specific problems.
But that is what you can charge the most, right?
Basically, the more specific your product feels, the higher its perceived quality.
This approach defines quality as reliability.
Here, you’re not focusing on the emotions, or fit, or stats… but on the “feel” of buying from you.
Did the thing work exactly the way it was supposed to? Was it delivered consistently, without deviation?
For service businesses, this is HUGE.
Yes, clients want results, but they also want to be carefree. If your client has no idea what’s happening and your communication isn’t strong, they’ll have a LOT of anxiety.
PRO TIP, LISTEN UP:
When you close a deal on a sales call, don’t just shut your laptop and go celebrate. Send your client that onboarding email, tell them what’s going to happen and when, immediately give them something to do…
When you buy an iPhone, there is no anxiety because you immediately receive the phone. Mimic that with your services.
And if your business depends on you personally to hold everything together… it’s not really a business yet. It’s just a job.
Building this kind of quality means operationalizing what you do:
Build systems that others can run. The less your business relies on last-minute Slack messages or “who’s free this week,” the better your quality will feel under this model.
If your clients ever say, “I loved working with you, but I didn’t always know what was happening”, this is the definition you need to focus on.
Give them that premium experience and charge the big bucks.
“NO WAY!”, you scream as you read this genius headline.
Value is REALLY important, obviously.
Here, quality is all about the ratio of benefits to price.
It’s not just about how ‘good’ your product is, it’s whether the customer feels like they got a great deal.
Even a basic product can feel high quality if it delivers outsized results…
…And even a beautiful, complex solution can feel low quality if the price feels too high for the outcome.
This is the best approach for early-stage founders and bootstrapped businesses.
You might not have all the features.
You might not be able to compete on polish.
But if you can make someone feel like they got a steal, you WIN.
If you’re working with clients, this can be quite easy.
Simply price your services as 10% – 20% of the outcome they get.
So if your promise is adding $10k to their monthly recurring revenue… charge up to $2,000/month for your service, and they’re mathematically getting a great deal.
That might mean adding a guarantee.
It might mean reducing the scope but delivering bigger results.
It might mean repositioning your product so the value becomes more obvious.
Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes. And if you can nail that feeling consistently, people will rave about you and refer you to more clients or customers.
It happens ALL the time. Everyone wants to be cool for orchestrating a killer deal.
Of course, there is no ONE way to define ‘quality’. That’s why there are 5 types of quality 😀
Try and implement as many of these angles as you can… where it makes sense for YOUR business.
Founders who succeed understand which version of “high quality” actually matters to their customers and build around that.
Here’s how to think about it:
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