3 ms·

Your explanation is very clear and really makes a lot of sense. > The customer's mental model is the only thing that matters here. Totally right > If you're

Your explanation is very clear and really makes a lot of sense. > The customer's mental model is the only thing that matters here. Totally right > If you're building a car or a skateboard, you're seeking to fit into an existing category in their head. Even if you win (which is unlikely, because incumbents optimize very heavily with lots of resources), you lose, because you're a commodity in a market with lots of substitutes. > If you want to actually win - in the sense of create a monopoly product that defines its own market - you, as an entrepreneur, need to be thinking in terms of the overall problem that the user wants solved (transportation, or information access, or answers) so that you can define the terms of the market in a way that you're the only reasonable solution. At what point should you start doing that? Using one of your examples: I don't think the Google founders had a vision of defining a new category of service. And they didn't even have a business model for several years. So what actually made them "win"?

nostrademons 7y ago
I think the Google founders had a vision of solving a problem. They wanted to make search work right. (Well, technically, they wanted to get their Ph.Ds - the actual history of Google was that Larry had the idea to download the web and throw away everything except the links, so he did that. Then he had the idea to visualize it as a big eigenvalue calculation on the probability of a random surfer ending up at a given page, and that's where he got the idea for PageRank. Then someone - might have been him, Sergey, or Scott Hassan - got the idea to sort webpages by PageRank, and the results were better than existing search engines, and so they launched BackRub as a search engine. Then Andy Bechtolsteim thought it could be a really big company and gave them $100K to make it one, and the rest is history.) If you steer towards problems, and do so without fear of the unknown, you'll naturally move towards ideas where you get to define the category. They wouldn't be problems if someone had already solved them! The rest - building a business, making money, marketing it, defining it in customers' heads, etc. - can all follow later.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

nostrademons 7y ago

I think the Google founders had a vision of solving a problem. They wanted to make search work right. (Well, technically, they wanted to get their Ph.Ds - the actual history of Google was that Larry had the idea to download the web and throw away everything except the links, so he did that. Then he had the idea to visualize it as a big eigenvalue calculation on the probability of a random surfer ending up at a given page, and that's where he got the idea for PageRank. Then someone - might have been him, Sergey, or Scott Hassan - got the idea to sort webpages by PageRank, and the results were better than existing search engines, and so they launched BackRub as a search engine. Then Andy Bechtolsteim thought it could be a really big company and gave them $100K to make it one, and the rest is history.) If you steer towards problems, and do so without fear of the unknown, you'll naturally move towards ideas where you get to define the category. They wouldn't be problems if someone had already solved them! The rest - building a business, making money, marketing it, defining it in customers' heads, etc. - can all follow later.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]