Learn more about startup with this collection
How to start a successful business
How to build a strong team
How to market your business
Tapping into the right level of abstraction
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 core concepts around which the entire product is built. They not only align with how customers think of their workflow, but often crystallizes for customers how they ought to. Great atomic concepts are honed and then extended and built upon in more complex compounds that…well for lack of a better word…compound .
Similar companies often have slightly different atomic concepts that end up making them meaningfully distinct. Photoshop is focused on pixels and images. Its focus is on editing images and pictures. And its functions operate by transforming them on a pixel level.
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How Adobe lost users to new startups
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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Changing customer needs
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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Identify new market needs
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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Approach the problem using different concepts
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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Changes which come with changing market scale
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 ...
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