My last two posts gave you questions to guide you through development of your product or service, whether your customer knows what they want or not. Whatever you’re going to sell, the goal is to solve a problem or fulfill a customer’s needs in ways that are better than what’s available and are so good they’re willing to pay for them.
Or you could just change the game.
Uber and Lyft did that. They didn’t make a better taxi service, they created ride sharing services and overhauled the method for finding and using transportation.
Think of how smartphones have replaced GPS devices in cars. Or how Pandora and Stitcher have obliterated satellite radio. I own stock in Sirius-XM and it’s worthless. Literally costs them more to send me a dividend check than the number printed on it. These new companies didn’t try to make a better GPS device or launch a better radio entertainment network. They created an entirely different, better way to provide the solution that has all but killed the old way. They created a new game.
THE TAKEAWAY
Think about the problem your trying to solve. Rather than try to fix it with incremental improvements and existing technologies, could you instead change the way people behave? This has the benefit of giving you an early monopoly, putting you in a leadership position and likely gaining outsized awareness.