I'm curious how education or entertainment companies fit into this framework, or how they think about PMF in general.
Was Duolingo targeting customers who accepted the "hard fact" that passive audio was the only way to learn a language? Was MasterClass a "future vision" because people didn't believe celebrities would spend their time teaching? Or is it that we NEED education and entertainment, so these two providers just differentiated from a crowded market.
Alternatively Duolingo sells a casual memory game that differentiate by giving the illusion of productivity. And Masterclass sells attention and status to a class of people who are already attention-oriented by stroking their egos. I’m not saying this hot take is necessarily true, but the market isn’t always categorized by what we intuitively think. And realizing that can sometimes give you a massive benefit, simply by applying existing and effective techniques (in these cases gamification and people-oriented success storytelling, respectively) from a domain your competitors don't understand or care about.
Yeah, to me, Duolingo seems to be Hard Fact. But MasterClass might be also Hard Fact. MasterClass is not a totally different education service compared to the existing incumbents. Online university could be MasterClass.
Was Duolingo targeting customers who accepted the "hard fact" that passive audio was the only way to learn a language? Was MasterClass a "future vision" because people didn't believe celebrities would spend their time teaching? Or is it that we NEED education and entertainment, so these two providers just differentiated from a crowded market.