Astrology expresses complex ideas about personality, life cycles, and relationship patterns through the shorthand of the planets and zodiac symbols. And that shorthand works well online, where symbols and shorthand are often baked into communication.
Prior to COVID, edtech companies largely sold to schools, with mixed results. There are many reasons the B2B model didn’t penetrate—a misalignment of stakeholders (not to mention the many degrees of separation between the buyers and the actual teachers), dispersed financial decision-makers, and long sales cycles among them. But the primary reason s... See more
The other comparison, though, is Skype. Just as for video, VOIP had been around for a long time, but Skype solved a lot of pieces of friction, in both engineering and user experience, and by doing so made VOIP a consumer product.
So many good examples of flows/products that become way more usable by removing steps. E.g. OCRing a photo you took using some 3rd party app vs. just selecting the text inside Apple's photos. I use the latter now multiple times a week and “all it did” was reduce steps. [1/3]
What is social media when there’s nothing to brag about? Many of us are discovering it’s a lot more fun. We had turned social media into a sport but spent the whole time staring at the scoreboard rather than embracing the joy of play.
In every market, there are “non-consumers,” individuals who don’t have the time, money, skill, access, or ability to consume existing offerings. A disruptive innovation introduces an affordable product/service that targets non-consumers—thus creating entirely new consumers within an entirely new value network.
But in all three cases, digital-first local media companies are looking to serve their communities without needing those fixed costs. It means that profitability can come much quicker than it ever will for newspapers.