6 ms·

There's a lot of great lessons here. (1) Billion-dollar companies are often built on products that consumers don't know what they want, until they see and expe

by donw 6y ago

There's a lot of great lessons here. (1) Billion-dollar companies are often built on products that consumers don't know what they want, until they see and experience it. Plenty of MP3 players pre-dated the iPod. But the iPod changed the market and put Apple back on the game board. The iPod had an experience, the form-factor, the capacity, and the horizontal integration -- being able to buy music directly on iTunes -- and once you experienced it, you realized that this was just better. (2) Find your blind spots and fix them. A wide variety of dolls, covering the full palette of skin colors, opened up a huge market for all the girls that didn't just want an Industry Standard Barbie Available In One Skin Tone. Rhianna had the same problem -- she could never find makeup that worked with her skin color. So she introduced her own makeup brand -- marketed as being for all women -- which is now valued in excess of three billion dollars. We see this a lot in Japan, by the way -- Silicon Valley companies come here, and engage in what I would say are aggressive levels of cultural ignorance. (3) Recognize the context around your customers. MGA recognized that Kids These Days spend a lot of time on YouTube, so they built a product designed to be YouTubed. Glock is a great example of this. The founder, Gaston Glock, didn't come from a gunsmithing or firearms manufacturing background. To create the first Glock pistol, Gaston put together a cross-functional working group, including metallurgists, plastic-manufacturing specialists, and members of the Austrian police and military that would actually use the design. Focusing on how the pistol would be used -- from both a tactical and logistical standpoint -- they created something which was a total departure from everything else on the market. A completely integrated safety system. Tool-less takedown and reassembly. Easy maintenance. Most companies require a unique magazine for each different type of pistol -- Glock magazines are totally interchangeable within the same feed mechanism. Today, Glock is the biggest pistol brand, and every other pistol manufacturer carries Glock-inspired design. Being able to look at problems from the outside is powerful.

tolbish 6y ago
Was Rhianna the first person to introduce makeup designed for brown and black women? I wonder if there were dozens of others before her that would have been just as or far more successful if they had the connections or name-brand recognition as Rhianna. In short, I am wondering if survivorship bias is at play.
duderific 6y ago
#3 makes a lot of sense to me. However, it seems like that could be tricky, because the context is always changing. For example, by the time your product comes out, you could have built it in the context of Snapchat but now everyone is using TikTok.
- donw 6y ago
  Context shifts at different speeds for different markets. For teens, keeping up is tough. Fashion moves fast. Nobody is in fisticuffs over Beanie Babies in 2020. For chefs? Professional and commercial kitchens have evolved they way they have for reasons. Think there was even a front-page article on this a few months ago, actually.
samwestdev 6y ago
> We see this a lot in Japan, by the way -- Silicon Valley companies come here, and engage in what I would say are aggressive levels of cultural ignorance. Any concrete example of this? I'm working in Tokyo right now and I see Japanese companies pretty much engage in anything SV throws this way (stuff like apple, slack, uber eats, github etc etc).
- donw 6y ago
  Sure! Apple is a bit of an exception because they created a completely new market -- the smartphone. Japanese companies move slowly, and are hobbled by design-by-committee, so their response to new market entrants is... leisurely. I'm not sure how that will play out long-term. We'll see where Apple is in twenty years. And Macs are very uncommon, compared to Windows PCs. SV tech tends to show up at startups, often started by Westerners that have moved here. That's a common pattern, and if you're in the foreigner bubble, it can be hard to notice. But in the rest of Japan? Slack? I'm not sure I actually know any Japanese companies that use it, and the market statistics don't show a lot of grip outside of the US/EU. Uber Eats is doing well! Especially with COVID-19. But that's after Uber fell totally flat launching here in Japan. And it remains to be seen if they can hold on to their lead. It took Uber years of flailing around when they first arrived here, during which they ignored advice like "Japanese taxis are super safe" and "Thumbing your nose at regulators here isn't going to work like it does in the US." Line totally dominates Japanese instant messaging. It's the WeChat of Japan. Facebook didn't really understand Japanese privacy needs until recently, and I don't see them un-seating Line. Apple Pay is a second-rate payment system in Japan, and doesn't work if you have a foreign credit card. Japanese banking is... complicated. I once had a gym that outright refused to take my monthly payment on a credit card -- until they realized that my bank and their bank didn't have a "relationship". Never in the US was I told that, in order to pay for a service, Wells Fargo first needed to take USAA out for dinner and a movie. Anyhow, Meetup never caught on here, because they didn't understand the market. Gap is around, but they never felt like a major player in the fashion space. None of the education offerings in the US have any traction here. OpenTable? Nope. You use TableCheck if you want a reservation somewhere. Overall, I don't see any of the companies on this list[1] having any traction at all here, outside of major players which (a) have invested billions; and (b) took years to understand the local market well enough to adapt their offerings. And even then... Google still has to to advertise in Japan, and I strongly suspect that Google Maps plays second fiddle to Norikae. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_based_in_the_San_Francisco_Bay_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_based_in_the...
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> The iPod had an experience, the form-factor, the capacity, and the horizontal integration -- being able to buy music directly on iTunes -- and once you experienced it, you realized that this was just better. Well, no. I was given an iPod, used it once, and determined it was worthless. And heavy. By contrast, I intentionally purchased a $30 Zen Stone and used it all the time, to play music in my car. The iPod's form factor, interface, and relation to iTunes are all downsides. The Zen Stone operated like any other USB drive, and you could easily operate it without looking at it.
- the-dude 6y ago
  Yeah, no wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
- twic 6y ago
  All those things seem like downsides to me too, and as a consequence, i've never owned an iPod. But clearly, empirically, lots of people love them. donw writes as if the appeal of an iPod is universal, but maybe this is just another example of their second point - MP3 player manufacturers before Apple had assumed that people want a tiny electronic gizmo that is an almost forgettable adjunct to their PCs, just a way to shovel music from hard disk to ear. Whereas it turned out there was a significant market for a player that was an artifact in its own right.

by donw 6y ago

tolbish 6y ago

Was Rhianna the first person to introduce makeup designed for brown and black women? I wonder if there were dozens of others before her that would have been just as or far more successful if they had the connections or name-brand recognition as Rhianna. In short, I am wondering if survivorship bias is at play.

duderific 6y ago

#3 makes a lot of sense to me. However, it seems like that could be tricky, because the context is always changing. For example, by the time your product comes out, you could have built it in the context of Snapchat but now everyone is using TikTok.

donw 6y ago
Context shifts at different speeds for different markets. For teens, keeping up is tough. Fashion moves fast. Nobody is in fisticuffs over Beanie Babies in 2020. For chefs? Professional and commercial kitchens have evolved they way they have for reasons. Think there was even a front-page article on this a few months ago, actually.

samwestdev 6y ago

> We see this a lot in Japan, by the way -- Silicon Valley companies come here, and engage in what I would say are aggressive levels of cultural ignorance. Any concrete example of this? I'm working in Tokyo right now and I see Japanese companies pretty much engage in anything SV throws this way (stuff like apple, slack, uber eats, github etc etc).

donw 6y ago
Sure! Apple is a bit of an exception because they created a completely new market -- the smartphone. Japanese companies move slowly, and are hobbled by design-by-committee, so their response to new market entrants is... leisurely. I'm not sure how that will play out long-term. We'll see where Apple is in twenty years. And Macs are very uncommon, compared to Windows PCs. SV tech tends to show up at startups, often started by Westerners that have moved here. That's a common pattern, and if you're in the foreigner bubble, it can be hard to notice. But in the rest of Japan? Slack? I'm not sure I actually know any Japanese companies that use it, and the market statistics don't show a lot of grip outside of the US/EU. Uber Eats is doing well! Especially with COVID-19. But that's after Uber fell totally flat launching here in Japan. And it remains to be seen if they can hold on to their lead. It took Uber years of flailing around when they first arrived here, during which they ignored advice like "Japanese taxis are super safe" and "Thumbing your nose at regulators here isn't going to work like it does in the US." Line totally dominates Japanese instant messaging. It's the WeChat of Japan. Facebook didn't really understand Japanese privacy needs until recently, and I don't see them un-seating Line. Apple Pay is a second-rate payment system in Japan, and doesn't work if you have a foreign credit card. Japanese banking is... complicated. I once had a gym that outright refused to take my monthly payment on a credit card -- until they realized that my bank and their bank didn't have a "relationship". Never in the US was I told that, in order to pay for a service, Wells Fargo first needed to take USAA out for dinner and a movie. Anyhow, Meetup never caught on here, because they didn't understand the market. Gap is around, but they never felt like a major player in the fashion space. None of the education offerings in the US have any traction here. OpenTable? Nope. You use TableCheck if you want a reservation somewhere. Overall, I don't see any of the companies on this list[1] having any traction at all here, outside of major players which (a) have invested billions; and (b) took years to understand the local market well enough to adapt their offerings. And even then... Google still has to to advertise in Japan, and I strongly suspect that Google Maps plays second fiddle to Norikae. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_based_in_the_San_Francisco_Bay_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_based_in_the...

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> The iPod had an experience, the form-factor, the capacity, and the horizontal integration -- being able to buy music directly on iTunes -- and once you experienced it, you realized that this was just better. Well, no. I was given an iPod, used it once, and determined it was worthless. And heavy. By contrast, I intentionally purchased a $30 Zen Stone and used it all the time, to play music in my car. The iPod's form factor, interface, and relation to iTunes are all downsides. The Zen Stone operated like any other USB drive, and you could easily operate it without looking at it.

the-dude 6y ago
Yeah, no wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
twic 6y ago
All those things seem like downsides to me too, and as a consequence, i've never owned an iPod. But clearly, empirically, lots of people love them. donw writes as if the appeal of an iPod is universal, but maybe this is just another example of their second point - MP3 player manufacturers before Apple had assumed that people want a tiny electronic gizmo that is an almost forgettable adjunct to their PCs, just a way to shovel music from hard disk to ear. Whereas it turned out there was a significant market for a player that was an artifact in its own right.