The Milo Criterion

I had the same reaction. I can't help but suspect that something meta is going on, "slow marketing" and all...

Yeah, I too felt a bit swizzed at the end. But if it wasn't for that last paragraph teasing more, it would have felt fairly substantial. Although I don't think you get to say things like "[The Milo Criterion] is the dominant dynamic for successful products." without a hell of a lot more evidence.

One thing that emphasizes the effect (as is the case with most blogs recently) is that the scroll bar shows a lengthy page but the content only makes a small part at the top.

End result: Unbeknownst to me, the page is comment-filled, so I was happily reading and scrolling down expecting content that up till now was really enjoyable, and was suddenly struck by The End. What a let down.

I really like the Ars Technica approach of initially hiding the comments. It really helps not raising expectations length-wise.

The other problem is to the extent that he does elaborate on this theory, the author is rather undermined by poor choice of examples to illustrate his point. If anything the examples he's chosen better illustrate the argument that early-adopting consumers are extremely willing to adapt to change in immature products, and have to make much of that adaptation up front.

The basic mechanics of learning to control a car in 1911 were much closer to that of controlling a car in 2011 than they were to driving a horse (it was a bit closer to the horse in 1896). We've added traffic, road layouts to cope with the traffic and a few digital devices supposed to make driving easier since then, but the pioneers of driving overcame pretty much the full learning curve at the very beginning.

Aviation is another great example of an area where there was vastly more conspicuous and rapid iteration and innovation when the industry was young. In the first 50 years the general public went from scepticism about the possibility of heavier-than-air machines flying to long-haul flights in the pressurised cabin of a Boeing narrowbody. There was a significant leap of faith by the early passengers just to trust the plane would land safely, and the amount of iteration in the design of airliners over a relatively short period was remarkable. In the same period of time since then, the consumer has had to learn to adapt to security procedures (and made a fuss about them) and more creative airline pricing and ticketing models.

I think that would be a fair way to summarise it, but be careful not to reduce something to obviousness and then say it's too simple.

The interesting point for me is that much of startup marketing wisdom seems to say "make things people want", whereas there's another school that says "make people want things" - aka the Blue Ocean strategy and kin. How is it that both of these things can exist? Why did Google succeed by beating the dead search horse? Why did Twitter succeed at selling SMS-meets-chat-meets-blog-meets-I'm-on-acid?

Likely everyone with an eye to marketing has some sense of a rubber band connecting the ambition to the zeitgeist. You can pull the market with you a little, but go too far and you lose it. It is, in fact, quite a popular idea that Twitter and Google just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

But "right place at the right time" is a bit hand-wavy and qualitative. Perhaps it would be better to find a more structured way of thinking about it. That, to me, is the point of this article - not so much Greek calves or the order of growth curves.

What if the success of the lean startup movement isn't that it lets you develop faster, but rather that it forces you to develop slower. That is, that by bringing customers and product closer, it prevents you from stretching the rubber band too far. If so, perhaps you could yield better results by reallocating effort from product iterations into determining and exploiting those limits.

I suspect where Venkat is going is that instead of asking "what do people want?" on one side and "how can we make them want it more?" on the other, you could treat marketing and development as being simultaneous complementary processes; much as a good video game will always present content at the limit of your skill, you could position your product at the limit of customer tolerance for change.

My guess: this was all inspired by Facebook's hilarious mismanagement of that limit.

However, I'm in agreement with the other commenters: major weak sauce that this wasn't examined further. Since when did Ribbon Farm leave the apple cart wheels-down? Conflict-averse indeed!

That's not the point and you know it.

http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html

It might not be a perfect metaphor but it does introduce the concept nicely. I have no reason to doubt his claim that he's pondered it for a couple of years.

It's a Greek myth, so how much realism do you really expect? For what it's worth, the way I've always heard it was that the boy and the calf did grow up together.

Seriously: your only problem with the story is that the cow and the boy grew up at about the same rate? Really?

Wow, what an amazing reading comprehension fail. Here's the text from the article:

The story goes that Milo, a famous wrestler in ancient Greece, gained his immense strength by lifting a newborn calf one day when he was a boy, and then lifting it every day as it grew. In a few years, he was able to lift the grown cow.