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To disrupt, you have to serve a marginal customer To be product-driven, you have to serve your own vision So to self-disrupt, you have to serve a currently marginal part of your own vision Which means a toy/game/hobby feature For an individual it literally means hobbies
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Hmm. A “tell” is apparently wasteful use of dev time while more “important” product features (lifestyle features for individuals) demand attention. Logic of ideas like “waste transistors” rests as much on “marginal” features (GUI etc) as cheap raw materials.
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Diagnostic questions: 1. What can you waste? 2. What’s a seemingly useless thing you could waste it on? 3. Who will be mad about it? If nobody is mad, there is no disruption. For product-driven, the “responsible” side of you has to get mad. Id make superego mad. Ego must choose
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It’s always bothered me that disruption theory assumes a customer-driven mindset, but the most disruptive companies tend to be product-driven. They find marginal markets by orienting towards peripheral visions, rather than directly asking “what marginal market can I serve?”
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isn’t that inherent in disruption theory, due to it being explanatory, not predictive. Christensen was good in explaining the success of disruptive entrants and the demise (strategic trap!) of incumbents. but it cannot predict what will be disruptive, and what won’t.
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or phrase differently: disruption typically starts as a hobby. does it follow that hobbies become disruption? not necessarily. but what proxy do you then use to describe successful disruption, hobbies that made the leap. that’s customers. so you observe how the market behaves.
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I think that’s the danger. It’s not the market. It’s probably your own iteration/learning loop rate. And customers may not actually be part of it until it’s already locked in.
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that took a while for me to unpack next to the day job. I like the framing. essentially, markets-explanation is cargo-culting product experimentation based on hunches, and post-rationalizing successes as disruption. lean startup and the MVP bible, then, is the couch-to-5k