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Other times the scale or dynamics of a market shift enough to make a product no longer work despite having been a great fit. Companies are often caught flat-footed by these situations because what they have done successfully for years suddenly starts to falter—and they aren’t sure why. Ebay is a good example of this. Their decentralized auction model was very good in a nascent internet economy when there was a scarcity of items being sold online. Once ecommerce became commonplace, price and speed became much more important factors and Ebay’s decentralized model was at a disadvantage. Amazon was much better at building economies of scale in this post-liquidity ecosystem.
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MORE IDEAS ON THIS
The best products map to how customers think about their workflow. They match the abstraction level of their customers: not too high that it’s unusable, but not too low that it’s hard to use easily or extend in more complex ways.
They choose the right atomic concepts.
These are the co...
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The internet drove entirely new design use cases. Photoshop was built for editing photos and images. It’s a powerful tool that operates at the pixel level. However, many of these new uses weren’t about image manipulation. Images were a component—not the essence—of the job users were trying to acc...
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Market entropy is good for new entrants.
It’s not impossible to break into a market by brute force, but it’s hard. Very hard. Most successful companies, especially startups, have found tailwinds to harness that help pull them forward.
Changing customer needs are the largest source of ...
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Emergent use cases and new customer types lead to new ideal atomic concepts. These new workflows and different customers have different priorities than existing customers. How they think about their problems and weight possible solutions is different, even if often the end output has similarities...
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How should we understand these market transitions and why these young companies are able to thrive, even against a strong incumbent like Adobe?
These companies have distinct atomic concepts from Adobe. The primitives that their products are built around are fundamentally different from thos...
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