Christopher Lochhead: belief

Transcript context

…They're launching the [inaudible 00:32:00] soon so they have another shot. Oh yeah. Now why, why did that happen? Why did one of the richest people in the history of the world, who's potentially one of the smartest people in the history of entrepreneurship in tech, fail so miserably when the entire world said he was going to "kill," quote, unquote, Twitter? And after the initial, quote, "success" of Threads everybody said that's exactly what was going to happen. And now all those experts are surprisingly quiet. The legendary Kevin Maney said that category design is a new lens on business. It's a different lens. It's sits next to the product lens, it sits next to the competition lens, but it is equally important. So here's what happened with Threads. They attacked an existing, well-known, well understood, incredibly well-defined problem with a direct copy. They even were celebrating that it was Twitter, just better. They said virtually those words. So known existing problem with a known existing solution that was, quote, unquote, "better" and integrated with the rest of the Meta shit. Quote, "Everybody checked it out and everybody went away." Why? Here's the aha. Problems create categories, and you either have to A, solve a new problem, or B, reframe, name and claim an existing problem in a, I'm going to use these words on purpose, very different way. And if you reframe the existing problem such that people see it in a different way, that's when they'll be open to a new solution. But the mistake is the impasses is on the wrong [inaudible 00:34:11]. The impasses is on the product. Because we live in a world where just like the availability of oxygen, we believe the best product wins. Zuckerberg is going to blow in excess of a billion dollars on Threads and it will fail. It already has failed. Because you can't take an existing problem with an existing solution, launch exactly the same shit, tell the world it's better and have the world embrace it. Because the problem makes the solution the other way around. So classic advice along these lines is, if you're, say, 10 times better than the existing product, you have a good chance at getting people to care and having success. Is there a line of just like it's the same thing but 10 times better? Or do you have to, in your experience, reframe? And I want to talk about that.…

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