There are many quotable quotes. The concept is, we “win” by having people adopt and care about the outcomes enabled by the software and services we sell. The saddle — the product itself — sells itself.
Encouraging people to explore decentralized web tech, build open source components, take control over their data, adopt specific technologies like IPFS — all of these are things we can promote which lead to increased usage of our product.
Despite the fact that there are a handful of direct competitors and a muddled history of superficially similar tools, we are setting out to define a new market. And that means we can’t limit ourselves to tweaking the product; we need to tweak the market too.
The best — maybe the only — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour. In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so.
Thatks why what we’re selling is organizational transformation. The software just happens to be the part we’re able to build & ship (and the means for us to get our cut).
…consider the hypothetical Acme Saddle Company…Or, they could sell horseback riding. Being successful at selling horseback riding means they grow the market for their product while giving the perfect context for talking about their saddles. It lets them position themselves as the leader and affords them different kinds of marketing and promotion opportunities (e.g., sponsoring school programs to promote riding to kids, working on land conservation or trail maps). It lets them think big and potentially be big.
It is almost inevitable that centralized internal communication systems will gradually replace email for most organizations over the next 10-20 years and we should do what we can to accelerate the trend and “own it”. We are at the beginning of a transition. We have an opportunity to both define the category and push hard for the whole market’s growth. We’d be crazy not to take it, because the best possible way to find product-market fit is to define your own market.