Christopher Lochhead: prediction

Transcript context

…Anybody who bikes on any kind of regular basis has been in an accident. And if you bike on a real regular basis, you've been in an accident with a vehicle that was not caused by you. That's true for every person I know that rides a bike on any regular basis, myself included. All of a sudden a new category shows up, and that new category is called indoor biking classes. And the category designer is a company called spinning. And they say, "Hey, biking's great. It's an incredible source of exercise, but you don't want to get killed doing it, so come take a class." And what they're doing when they do that, they're competing category to category, not brand or product to brand. And that's a strategy that's called damming the demand. What does a dam do? There's a bunch of water running in the direction, a dam takes that water, stops it and moves it, does something to it. Interrupts it and changes it. Here's what spinning does. They say, "Why risk your life on a bike when you can take a wonderful class and not have to worry about it and get your exercise?" What dam the demand, Lenny, is you thought you wanted this, but what you really need is that. Then what happens? The next iteration in that space comes from Peloton. Again, when Peloton launches, they don't say, "Hey, our bikes are better than spinning bikes. Our bikes are 12 mega flips, faster, cheaper." They don't do any of that shit. They don't shit on spinning, they don't attack spinning, they don't attack road biking, they don't do any of that stuff. They say, "Why drive to the gym when you could do it at home?" They dam the demand for spinning, they don't compete against it. And they reframe the problem called "How do I get a great workout in a group environment without getting killed?" And they achieve that massive success. And I can give you many other examples. The mistake is competing directly product to product. The enemy is the status quo. That is to say the way it is now. If you go back to Lomi, the enemy, the way it is now, the status quo, is a nasty garbage in your kitchen that stinks and smells and gets all over the floor that you have to drag to the green bin and then the squirrels and the fucking raccoons eat it. That's the personal upset. And the environmental one is, we're destroying the planet. No, by the way, rather than destroy the planet, why not create this super awesome compost dirt? In category design, we call that a from to a Frodo. Category designers are leading the world from the way it is to a new and different way. They're not saying, "My carbide ingulator is better than their carbide ingulator." Here's a simple example. This is another reason the word disrupt doesn't work. Les Paul is the innovator of the electric guitar. Today most guitar players have an electric guitar and an acoustic guitar. re's a simple example. This is another reason the word disrupt doesn't work. Les Paul is the innovator of the electric guitar. Today most guitar players have an electric guitar and an acoustic guitar. Matter of fact, most guitar players have more than one, very few guitar players, some, but very few said, "Oh, now that the electric guitar is invented, fuck the acoustic guitar." Very, very rare. The net new category called electric... So the net new category called electric guitar as opposed to the prior category, acoustic guitar, actually increases the overall guitar TAM. Doesn't disrupt shit. So in that case, you're actually creating net new demand. In the Peloton example, you're both creating that new demand and you're getting your start. And this is where I think a lot of the discussion that you have and a lot of your work, Lenny, around growth, is really powerful, because what's really going on when growth works is effective digital damning of demand. That's what's really going on, when it works. I think somewhere maybe wrote this, "Damn the TAM" is an awesome phrase. If you haven't, you should use that. Damning the TAM, increasing the TAM. So you have a number of books you put out. I'm going to link to all these. Play Bigger, I think, was your first, Niche Down is the other. And your newest book, I believe is your newest book, is the 22 Laws of Category Design. So maybe just as a last question, can you just share a few of these laws, maybe two or three of your favorite laws from the book just to give people a sense of the book?…

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