How To Develop Ideas That Will Disrupt Your Industry
mashable.com
mashable.com
There are hundreds and hundreds of tiny industries that technology seems to have forgotten (I work in one of them). There is a forklift dealership that I pass on my way to lunch every few days, what type of computing infrastructure do you think they have? What type of information do you think they give to their customers?
I bet there is a lot of carbon-copy paper, and filing cabinets involved. If they're really advanced, I bet there's an old IBM baby mainframe sitting in a closet somewhere with some twinax terminals connected to it.
Here's a company that's throwing really really expensive "I need this" (a forklift isn't a luxury) equipment around. I'd bet you that they've got money to spend on tech, they just don't know how.
Howabout office automation? Do you know how many times I get pitched by "office solutions specialists" who have no idea what they're doing, or talking about? There is definitely some space for somebody who Knows What They're Doing™ to get my money.
Do you know how terrible inventory management systems are? Pardon the language, but fucking horrible.
I think a lot of tech people forget that there a whole world out there that barely even knows that silicon valley exists. There are thousands and thousands of small business that will pay large dollars for things, and for these people (who are usually stuck in the technological late-80s/early-90s), being "disruptive" is what most programmers think is normal.
See my post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2351573
Basically, all the small business applications can be app-ized and run from a cloud connected iPad.
Where I said:
HNers:
I think that Square is an exceptional business enabled by a novel piece of hardware, their headphone jack card reader.
It would seem - then, that the card reader and payment service could actually be seen as a platform play.
Platforms are technologies that are useful themselves - but enable far reaching, broader use cases in ways, that at times, can be unforeseen.
Square could enable a range of cottage industries by providing other applications built on their solution.
We have the ability for mobile payments, as it were, and thus we should see a need for dead-simple mobile business management apps; inventory, supply chain, vendor management, invoicing, product lists etc.
This leads me to believe that Square is a platform that through its deployment applications can be built upon it that will change the way commerce can happen on the individual level.
Further - it would seem that there is also a great opportunity for sales distribution here as well. A product distributor could reach out to and enable a mobile sales force providing all these applications to their sales force in the field on a single device - as the merchants sell product, it can be tracked in real time and supplies replenished.
This could work very well in connected, yet less-developed countries such as rural Philippines, China and other parts of Asia.
Couple this with prepaid charge cards -- and the ability to LOAD cards in the longer term, and there are some significant opportunities that can be built using square alone.
They are of course right on the money when the idea is "I wan't to build a WOW community" but that is at least in my view a very narrow definition of what ideas are all about.
I'd like to think of it this way: execution is the active searching of the problem space until you find a local maxima. The idea is only the starting point.
Sure, you can get lucky and find an idea that is already on a local maxima - but you wouldn't know that without verifying.
Simply thinking "what if you sold socks that didn't match?" is far from enough to prove that it's a good idea. If you gave it just five minutes you would probably come up with a hundred similar seemingly weird ideas.
Some examples:
What if TVs were not boxes but bubble-shaped?
What if cars bounced like rubber balls? Would that make them safer?
What if pants had four legs? Of different lengths.
What if shoes were glued together?
What if I had an internet connected computer in my sight of vision constantly? (This will happen, we all know that.)
What if books never ended?
What if people could grow all their food, including meat, at home, in a box like a micro oven?
I can go on like this forever. How do I know which ideas are the good ones?
By testing them in the real world - searching the problem space for a local maxima - that's the only way. And that takes execution and effort.
But all you are saying is.
If you have an idea you have to try it out.
Yes obviously but try what out? What does it mean to execute.
And this is where it kind of falls apart from my point of view.
Saying "execution is everything" is as helpful as saying success is necessary to be successful. It becomes a tautology.
It's true but it's not really helpful unless you really think that just getting the idea is enough. But who here believes that?
What's great execution in one context is bad execution in another. Meaning that you have to execute to figure out whether you executed well.
You have to run the program so to speak.
For example, Apple's Newton PDA: Great idea — it caught on like wildfire when Palm did the same thing a few years later. But it flopped when Apple did it, because Apple's execution was flawed.
How about a restaurant for three-somes full of tables for 3 and spring rolls that divide equally?
A clothing brand that only sells one color/type of jeans, one t-shirt and one button down. Instead of launching new collections every season, launch one new product. Like a belt. It would stand out.
Or have a rectangular table for 6 with a low divider down the middle, so that it doesn't feel intrusive to join it (nor exclusionary to talk only amongst each 3).
Worth remembering too - just because there's a gap in the market, doesn't mean there's a market in the gap. Cliches like 'scratch your own itch', 'do market research before product build', 'release early, release often' etc also have a place when disrupting.
If you're like me and find developing applications easy but have a very hard time deciding what to create, I'd recommend reading Disrupt.
Actually, there was a problem. Customers loose socks, leaving mismatched, or socks get holes, leaving only one, etc. etc. etc.
They recognized a problem. They just came up with a creative way of dealing with the problem which was to re-frame it as not being a problem at all.
The impressive thing is that you can disrupt a market through nothing but marketing. You don't have to create a new product, find a new market, etc. etc. It is possible to create a viable business through nothing but marketing.
"Our most popular style of socks. This pack contains 3 socks that don’t match, but perfectly coordinate ! "
It can be "disruptive thinking."
There's usually an unofficial cartel no one speaks of and when people start to lose their margins, they start to take notice.