Dig Deeper

I was cleaning out some emails recently and found this from Seth Godin:

Solving a different problem

The telephone destroyed the telegraph.

Here's why people liked the telegraph: It was universal, inexpensive, asynchronous and it left a paper trail.

The telephone offered not one of these four attributes. It was far from universal, and if someone didn't have a phone, you couldn't call them. It was expensive, even before someone called you. It was synchronous--if you weren't home, no call got made. And of course, there was no paper trail.

If the telephone guys had set out to make something that did what the telegraph does, but better, they probably would have failed. Instead, they solved a different problem, in such an overwhelmingly useful way that they eliminated the feature set of the competition.

The list of examples is long (YouTube vs. television, web vs. newspapers, Nike vs. sneakers). Your turn.

Now the reason that the telephone replaced the telegraph, was that it dug deeper into the core of what the telegraph accomplished. That was: the ability to communicate to someone in a different part of the world.

And it added some additional features such as the ability to converse back and forth like a real conversation. It also added the ability to enhance communication by hearing the voice of the other person which added the element of emotion. And finally, it added privacy and personalization.

As you look around at how to improve, make sure you dig deep enough to find the real need.

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