Re:Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship...
by brightball on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @01:12PM
(#17610915)
When it comes to products, the real driver is pain relief rather than usefulness.
There are a lot of useful contraptions and services out there. Unless those innovations solve a pain point that I'm experiencing, I still don't have a huge incentive to use them.
As an over the top example, when the iPhone came out it wasn't just a better phone. It solved serious pain points from all of the existing technology. Terrible software, terrible cameras, terrible data transfer, terrible mobile web browsing, terrible voicemail experience of dialing in and listening through an audio menu, terrible PDA experience of needing a separate device like a Palm Pilot. There were so many real pain points that people were experiencing that the iPhone solved, there's a reason people called it the Jesus Phone.
That's not the same as somebody starting a small business of course. Even adding better restaurant selection to an area goes a long way to solving a pain point. The area where I live has a serious shortage of quality "healthy" food options near by...a single one opened up that fits the bill and tastes good and it's constantly packed.
In dense metropolitan areas, there are usually businesses setup to address just about anything. The more rural you get, there's less of a market but more of a need.
On the internet and in the software world where the entire world is the marketplace, it's really hard to find needs that have not yet been addressed so there are a number of fast-followers and incremental improvements.
A lot of focus ends up being on technology that could potentially create new markets, like IoT, etc.
There are a lot of useful contraptions and services out there. Unless those innovations solve a pain point that I'm experiencing, I still don't have a huge incentive to use them.
As an over the top example, when the iPhone came out it wasn't just a better phone. It solved serious pain points from all of the existing technology. Terrible software, terrible cameras, terrible data transfer, terrible mobile web browsing, terrible voicemail experience of dialing in and listening through an audio menu, terrible PDA experience of needing a separate device like a Palm Pilot. There were so many real pain points that people were experiencing that the iPhone solved, there's a reason people called it the Jesus Phone.
That's not the same as somebody starting a small business of course. Even adding better restaurant selection to an area goes a long way to solving a pain point. The area where I live has a serious shortage of quality "healthy" food options near by...a single one opened up that fits the bill and tastes good and it's constantly packed.
In dense metropolitan areas, there are usually businesses setup to address just about anything. The more rural you get, there's less of a market but more of a need.
On the internet and in the software world where the entire world is the marketplace, it's really hard to find needs that have not yet been addressed so there are a number of fast-followers and incremental improvements.
A lot of focus ends up being on technology that could potentially create new markets, like IoT, etc.