Competition is not market validation(ablg.io) |
Competition is not market validation(ablg.io) |
- markets are patterns in what people are trying to get done (importance / satisfaction)
- having an objective to validate a market is foolish for startup founders, maybe it makes sense as DD for vcs but they never do it, which is also foolish (founders should be trying to discover and understand markets, not validate them)
- getting good at quickly discovering and seeing truth in markets is a skill that can be developed, and is extremely valuable for engineers to learn
- opportunities are all about timing, and requires knowing about lots of markets and lots of tech and seeing how they can come together
- the timing is all about knowing how good tech needs to be to be better at getting customer job done, which requires understanding tech and empathy for customers (or luck)
- pmfit failure rate is so high because most founders don't even know what a market is
I can think of NFT infrastructure here:
Various product categories were created with market leaders that owned them.
But the NFT hype didn’t hold and we effectively realized the use cases didn’t manifest beyond ZIRP-driven speculation and a small collector-artist scene.
So that can negate the whole category or crown a different winner when a technology changes.
Imagine if we used NFTs to verify if an AI or human made a piece of media.
Suddenly “marketplace” becomes a much less interesting category than scalable, fast APIs to create NFTs
Yea.. maybe change your focus?
Get in loser, we're going for a monopoly! It's all fun and games until you're locked in and enshitification sets in. I would sooner go without than get fooled again.
If your competitors have customers, I think that is a sign of market validation. If they do not, then you might not either.
Lots of companies successfully raising funds isn't market validation, but who ever said it was?
This is tautological as there is no other way of reading customer demand than the market. Otherwise, I suspect, the vast majority of customer demand would not be available to purchase at all.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/kzoh1c/i_am...
This article is assume startup - you raise a lot of money and get a lot of people to help you build the product fast to get to the very large market. A valid strategy and can earn you a lot of money if there is a large market you can serve.
However there are a lot of markets that are not that big. If your passion is something Pet Rocks - that will probably be a tiny market (it was once big for a short time, but the time is over and unlikely to come back - thought maybe I'm wrong). You are unlikely to every grow a large business because there are so few other people interested in your passion.
There are other markets where your interest/passion will make one person a nice income, but can never scale to a large company. The investors this article is concerned about want nothing to do with it: they can never make their investment back. However you as a person can make a lot of money in this niche self funding the company and growing no faster. It will be hard work, and it will only get you into the lower end of the upper middle class, never rich - but that can be a nice life.
Or you can discover the hard way there is only so much you can take of your interest before you burn out.
Or they might have a single customer - which because they treat well and charge a fair price you won't be able to get away from them.
I did watch the video of him and I can confirm (so no one else wastes their time) he does not address why monopolies are great for everyone other than the CEO. But he does go into depth about why women should not wear Hillary Clinton style pantsuits when pitching ideas to him. Noted.
I am not sure if the video is the same as the article, but there is no way I am going to pay a penny to hear what Theil has to say. Honestly, after I heard him rambling about the anti-christ crap he spews I would pay for him to stop talking.
The rude thing would be to respond based on the title, when the article is actually about something else.
> appeal to authority
Very true, reading the article before commenting is definitely not for "free thinkers".
The article is not about how monopolies are good for society.
It’s about how businesses over emphasize small differences which make them indistinguishable from their competition.
It’s better to be in your own category rather than a slightly different permutation.
Capturing the value you produce from a business is actually very difficult. Think about how many Facebook users are a net less for the business. Good business plans also plan for capturing value.
I agree that the best way to capture value is to destroy all competition or otherwise ensure that the customer has no other options. It is also deeply unethical, even if within the current law. I'll note that anti-trust laws have been eroded in the past two decades as the gov has caved to corporate pressure and lobbyists.
I also can't pretend I don't see a relationship here to Theil's financial backing of Curtis Yarvin, who calls for replacing democracy with a corporate-led monarchy -- the political form of monopoly. Creepy!