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. Of course, astute readers will pick up that causality is reversed here. New types of customers are a good proxy for where to pay attention. But it is actually the changed atomic concepts that are what make startups a compelling contender against incumbents in the space.

Customers don’t care about your technical architecture or internal org structure. When these no longer align with the job they are trying to do, then all the sprawl of the company becomes harmful, not helpful. These are the core bedrock that are much more difficult for a company to change mid-flight. Everything that makes an established company strong is built on top of this foundation and will fight back against changing them. Take Blockbuster and its reliance on physical stores and late fees. People often fall into the easy narrative that incumbents are asleep at the wheel. That they are too stupid to see the coming threat. This can be true but it isn’t the most common reason. Contrary to popular belief, many execs at Blockbuster not only saw the threat Netflix posed, but also the opportunity for Blockbuster to have claimed the mantle Netflix now holds. They even spun up a team to take Netflix head on. But what made retail stores and late fees so powerful and profitable for Blockbuster is also what made them so hard to displace. Every move to prepare Blockbuster’s core for a digital future was resisted by execs who generated more revenue, store operators who were livid at being cut out, and Wall Street investors uncomfortable with turning a consistent business into a high risk venture.