Monetization Playbook #40—Iterating the future
You can't read about the future — but you can often iterate from the past.
Your market thesis is usually a mixture of what you already know plus a leap of faith.
The combination of hypotheses–that, when aligned–creates a new market that you seek to exploit.
We can break this down into:
what you need to know
what you currently know
the gap
To bridge this gap–a cocktail of observations, logic, determination, experiments, and hope is required.
Par for the course. Yet largely unstated, unwritten, and unvoiced.
An internal memo back in Slack's early days stands out as the modern-day example of a 'once more unto the breach' rabble-rousing speech.
We don't sell saddles here–by Slack's CEO nails what is required to bridge 'the gap.' A few highlights below illustrate the team's mission.
–To do this well, we need to take a holistic approach and not just think about a long list of individual tasks.
–None of the work we are doing to develop the product is an end in itself; it must aim at the larger purpose.
–We'll need to build tools to capture users' behaviour and reactions. And then we'll need to take all that information and our best instincts and be continuously improving.
–Since it is new and less familiar, we are less able to fall back on well-established best practices.
–The answer to "Why?" is "because why the fu** else would you even want to be alive but to do things as well as you can?".
Now: let's do this.