Notes from one of my favorite podcasts of all time. Big fan of his books as well. Notes are courtesy (link)
- Just like you can design a product, just like you can design a company culture or business model, you can actually design a market.
- Example : Purell reimagined the problem, not as, “How do I wash my hands,” but as, “How do I wash my hands without a disgusting bar soap?” And Gojo created a whole new category called liquid soap. Later > Waterless soap (sanitizer)
- The number one question for any entrepreneur or any creator at all is, “Do I want to compete for 24% of an existing market category? Or do I want to create my own where if I can execute, I will earn two-thirds of the economics?” That’s the decision that most entrepreneurs make, that they don’t know that they made.
- Problems create categories, and you either have to A, solve a new problem, or B, reframe, name and claim an existing problem in A. And if you reframe the existing problem such that people see it in a different way, that’s when they’ll be open to a new solution.
- Threads failure : They attacked an existing, well-known, well understood, incredibly well-defined problem with a direct copy. So known existing problem with a known existing solution that was, quote, unquote, “better” and integrated with the rest of the Meta shit.
- Fire phone failure : Bezos launched a better product and nobody bought it. And the reason nobody bought it is the problem. And therefore the solution that you think you’re solving with your iPhone is solved with your iPhone.
- The category made the brand not the other way around.
- Microsoft copying apple stores : you can’t attack an incumbent category queen unless you frame, name and claim a new or different problem. Because when the existing problem is well understood and the existing solution is well understood, there’s no need for a new solution.
- The tragedy in this is how many legendary innovative products never got to see the light of day because the inventor, the creator, the entrepreneur, believed in the product, but didn’t know that every solution has to fit into a problem of value for people. And so their innovation went nowhere.
- There’s something in category design called languaging, which is the strategic use of language to change thinking. And a mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make is they use old language to describe their new thing. And we can’t use so much new language that nobody knows what the fuck we’re talking about, so we have to meet the category where it is and bring them forward, but we have to create new language.
- in category design, one of the breakthroughs is this thing called a point of view, which helps you frame, claim and name a problem and educate the world on why they should move from the way it is to, we call them frotos, from to, a new and different way. Otis elevator : “the vertical railway”
- Categories are about customers and their wants, needs, problems and opportunities. Branding and marketing is about our product. And the greatest innovators in the world don’t stop at innovating a product or technology. They design a new innovative market category where they standalone.
- Positioning: The question is, what are you positioning against? Almost all of the time – anwer is competition. If you’re doing positioning in that context, you just decided you’re fighting for 24% of the demand designed by somebody else. And we think in the tech space where one company earns two thirds of the economics, if that’s your starting point, you screw yourself from the start. To put it simply, positioning in the modern context is for losers. That is to say people who are fighting over the 24%. That’s positioning.
- In category design, we don’t compete, period, full stop at the brand to brand or product to product level. Category designers do compete, but not against a product, not against a company, not against a brand. Category designers compete against the status quo. The mistake is competing directly product to product. The enemy is the status quo. That is to say the way it is now.