| "If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse'" ~~ Henry Ford OK, that's likely apocryphal, but the overall point is kinda valid. People don't always know what they want - because they don't always know what is possible. So the real question requires digging deeper... it's not enough to know "I want a faster horse", you need to know that they really mean "I want to get there faster, and be able to travel much further without having to stop and feed/rest the horse, and I want to travel inside a heated/cooled conveyance, and I want music while I'm in transit" and so on. Now you might argue "Well, the customer could have said all of that" and in a pedantic sense you'd be right. But the typical customer wouldn't have had the imagination to even think that stuff because it would have seemed like science fiction at the time. I think that's the real key to entrepreneurship: combining deeper insights about what people really want/need (based on their words and/or observed actions) with a deep understanding of what's possible at the bleeding edge of technology, and using that combination to build something awesome. Of course that's easier said than done. I mean, I have no idea how to do it myself. But one can keep trying... |
What I am saying is that the "deeper insights about what people really want/need (based on their words and/or observed actions)" aren't really that deep when you consider the amount of information available. Its surprising to me that people like you and me rely on people's claims to develop a hypothesis and test ideas. Shouldn't it be easy to get insights on a large portion of the population?