One of the nice things about researching and writing lots of cases about companies successfully navigating the Idea Maze and finding product-market fit is that you get to disabuse yourself of certain notions.
Like for instance, that you need to know what you're doing.
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I mean, there are stories like Instagram where the founders knew what they were doing and they got massively lucky.
And stories like PayPal where they didn't really know what they were doing but they were smart to recognise a good thing and smart to lean in and make it work.
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But then you have, like, Milton Hershey, who decided to come up with milk chocolate from scratch, ignoring decades of European knowledge on how to do this, and after massive amounts of money (including building a factory BEFORE he figured it out), came up with the genius idea ...
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... to slowly boil the milk at a low temperature in order to condense it, thus creating this slightly acidic, sour taste.
And then, being egalitarian, he priced it at ten cents and blanketed the entire US with his milk chocolate.
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As a result, millions of Americans grew up thinking that milk chocolate is SUPPOSED to taste slightly sour, and the Europeans hate the stuff, but because candy is the result of 'affective valence' (you like what you grew up eating), Hershey kinda ruined the US market for everyone
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A genius idea.
So now you have a brand moat, with a taste that no self-respecting chocolatier would touch with a barge pole, and an entire market trained to like that taste ...
You'd almost think he did this all intentionally!
Except he didn't really care about business LOL
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If you want more of where this came from, you'll probably want to check out the Commoncog case library I'm building: commoncog.com/caselib/
The Hershey case isn't part of the launch, but it's such a crazy story I've already started work on it.
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The source, incidentally, is Emperors of Chocolate, which I highly recommend because it’s basically a Shakespearean tale of two families, a partnership bound to fail, a tragic story of love and commerce and sugar …
Actually it’s just the story of Hershey vs Mars.
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Is it just a high degree of randomness and therefore luck that governs this world, or is there some undefined source of (divine) inspiration that's driving some of our seemingly irrational but eventually succesful choices?
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