Web3 Companies Should Learn From Apple: It's About Getting People To Want What You Build

We all talk about demand and supply like someone just wakes up one day and demands that a borderless currency that is void of a single entity's control should be built.

Nah, absolutely not.

There's no fuckin way in hell a lot of people out there thought about “crypto” and needed it be built. Most people did not even know they wanted something like this, but it got built and this is the interesting part but first, let's talk about Apple.

Apple, The Original Mission - Under Steve Jobs

Usually when starting a business and you begin to read all them financial blogs, take courses and all that, you mostly get advice that says: study the market, and this is usually followed by “building what is demanded” or to put it plainly: you gotta give the people what they want.

Trust me when I say that this is good advice, but it is not for everyone.

Naturally, we are opportunistic creatures, we look out for gaps in the universe that allow us to draw value from it and we take it.

For example, a guy seizing an opportunity to talk to a girl as he finds she recently broke up, or a child seizing an opportunity to talk to his/her dad about needed stuff when she finds he's in a good mood.

There's just a lot more out there to prove that taking opportunities in the market works, but how far?

How long before daddy is not in a good mood anymore and you can't ask for stuff?

This is exactly how the business market is. When you follow what's demanded - opportunities that people create, you're deciding to build a company that swings by the emotions of “people” and this is something that is known to be quite volatile.

This essentially puts your company in a tough spot to keep jumping from one shit to the other without having any unique identity in the ecosystem.

Apple, under Steve Jobs at least, was all about building what the people will need “eventually” not what they wanted or demanded at the time.

Though I can't cite relevant sources for the following quotes, but most times, these quotes are attributed to Steve Jobs as his speech on how Apple builds products:

"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

"Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.”

The second one sounds really crazy because as a businessman, you're certainly no magician, hence, can't exactly predict or know what the people will want.

But the first quote really strikes a chord.

Let me adjust it a bit to take form of what I translate it to be:

“A lot of times, people don't know they'd want something until you make them to”.

The business of standing the test of time is about building and getting people to want what you're building. Satoshi figured he didn't like the banking system, he made Bitcoin and gave people reasons to want it and here we are.

I say once again that there's no way in hell a regular person would have sat and thought of needing something like Bitcoin, that's just insane.

But we have a lot of companies today chasing trends like a house fly chasing scent and we all know how it ends: it chases till he meets his grave.

Web3 companies ought to understand that there's no exemption here, if they choose the business of serving trends, they'd end up where people pleasers end up.

But if they could build and make people want what they build, that's where they can create a strong industry of unique brands.

The inner workings of the world have people creating problems so they can present solutions and make a bank off it.

It's all about being the author of your own market, you create the opportunities and set the stage for what people should want and trust that they will want it.

Posted Using InLeo Alpha