All posts by Paras Chopra

There’s an inherent tension between how an engineer sees the product under development and how a potential user sees it. Engineers get excited by the technological advances and the number of options exposed in the gadget. A user sees all such complexity as overwhelming and off-putting.

It’s easy for a creator to forget that the user has a life to live and using their product isn’t a highlight of her life. Rather, it’s likely a chore.

People want their desires to be fulfilled in the most convenient manner. So, if someone wants to go from point A to point B, the most perfect solution would be instant teleportation and not starting the car and driving on the road. People care about their problems, and your solution is only an incidental means to solving those problems. ...  Read the entire post →

It’s common for entrepreneurs to cast a wide net early on and imagine their market to be huge. The logic goes something like this: if the market is worth a hundred billion dollars, then even if 1% of it is captured, the company will be making a billion dollars.

All this sounds good in theory but in practice, it never works this way.

Why would the market leader – the big fish in the ocean – let you take even 1% of the market? In fact, as soon as your startup shows first signs of success, the big fish will do whatever it can to crush you and snatch whatever market share you may have won by that time.  ...  Read the entire post →

There are two ways an entrepreneur can fail: a) launch a product that nobody desires; b) launch a product that people desire but with no significant advantage over established competitors (hence give no strong reason for a customer to switch away).

These two failure modes have their analogous success modes: a) culture-led startup success where a new desire is discovered and fulfilled; b) technology-led startup success where new technology is used to fulfill an existing desire.

Let’s explore culture-led startups first.

They are the ones in which the entrepreneur is able to observe a pattern of new derivative desires that didn’t exist before. Such trends are very hard to spot because initially they can be mistaken either as fads or insignificant.  ...  Read the entire post →

Any one person or one company cannot create a new market. Markets are usually co-created by multiple competitors offering to satisfy a particular customer desire. Even the markets that seem to be dominated by one company usually have multiple credible competitors – Google has Bing and DuckDuckGo and Facebook has Twitter, TikTok and Snapchat.

Oligopolies exist because the first company to launch a product is rarely a home-run in terms of getting the market-product fit right. In fact, the innovative company ends up producing evidence for demand in the market for fast followers. ...  Read the entire post →

It’s near impossible for a product to create a new desire in customers all by itself. No single product creates a market. What usually happens is that multiple environmental, political, economic, social, and technological factors come together to delicately and gradually shape what customers desire, which then creates an opening for new products to address such evolved expectations.

The million dollar question is: how do you discover these evolving trends?

The best way to discover these unambiguous market trends is to look for instances where customers are innovating by themselves by modifying or re-imagining existing products. ...  Read the entire post →

It’s important to clearly distinguish between what people desire and how they fulfill them. Our desires usually remain the same, but methods of fulfillment keep changing. For example, the desire to have good oral hygiene can be fulfilled in multiple ways: toothbrushes, mouth wash, or even crunchy foods like carrots that help clean mouth as we chew on them.

What people care about is their desires and not how they’re currently fulfilling them. If a better way to fulfill their desire comes along, they’ll switch to it in a jiffy. This is why innovative startups take over entrenched incumbents. People really have no loyalty to solutions. ...  Read the entire post →