Do not haste to fit your idea into a “market”!
Market-fit (or in a non-business terminology idea-utility validation) comes lot later (if at all) … at least, not before you have first ascertained the novelty and then the feasibility. Feasibility has a lot to do with how well you have developed your background and how smart you are in forming the right team. In this issue, I will be making my point arguing against the hyped-up emphasis on market-fit.
Market-fit is secondary
Many may argue that market-fit is the first thing to be done. But if that was so then no crazy ideas would have come up and driven the world into a generation beyond. Ford would have come up with better horse carriages and not cars if he had been too fixated on market-fit research. What matters is your dreams, your ambition to change the world we live in. And your dreams are precious because millions share that as well — consciously or subconsciously.
If you have, say, a business idea, there is no point rummaging in b-school mags in the quest of a market-fit, until you have done two most important exercises: novelty check and feasibility check. Novelty check ensures two things:
- You have instinctively struck upon something that is yet to be there, or yet to be put to perfection.
- This new something is exciting enough from an intellectual standpoint and/or meaningful enough from a societal standpoint.
Feasibility check ensures three things:
- You have the capability of envisioning the product.
- You have crisp idea as to how to proceed over the next one year.
- You have a reasonably good team to initiate the process.
What if all the homework goes to waste?
But what if, after all the study and team-building, you do not see an immediate “market”? Believe it or not, with the right team you will soon be able to understand how to tweak your idea into something more relevant to the time, once you have a solid know-how backing your idea. But more importantly, you will be able to understand the “latent need” that is often ignored or not seen in many market research exercises. Ford was smart to see that and so did Steve Jobs, and way back in the early 1700s Thomas Newcomen (yes, it wasn’t really James Watt who was behind the steam engine).
Crazy ideas rule …. Back in 1996, two grad students in Stanford wanted to “download the entire web” into a couple of garage machines. I would have called it ambitious had I known them personally, but many did call them crazy. We are talking about Larry and Sergei, and it was this craziness that gave Google to the world and is driving the company to many other incredible possibilities, one example being the Google quantum computing project. Nobody really understood or even cared to understand why Gutenberg was so hell bent to manufacture the mechanical type printer. But it’s more often than one can imagine that the next-gen need is latent. If you are still not able to get out of your cocoon then perhaps this little piece of inspiration from Steve Jobs might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAVW-jLRLE8.
No kidding, craziness rules the world and it’s this craziness that we want to fuel in what we call the “Rygbee movement”. More about it later!
