> The sweet spot isn’t an empty market. It’s a crowded market with broken execution.
The broken execution can include being twisted by perverse incentives.
Example: social media tending to converge on a mix of outrage doom-scrolling for engagement, selling out privacy, and force-feeding ads/ideas.
I ran into the perverse incentives problem, in a different space (not social media). Basically, there's a fairly simple solution to a problem for the majority of users/customers with this problem. But they need assistance at scale, like from a tech company, and there are perverse incentives for a company to pretend to solve the problem, while actively working against solving it. There's big demand for a solution, but most of the money is in not solving it, and it's easy money. One big player even acquires most of the competition, and twists them into the same awfulness, just with different veneers. (And, if you're a pair of idealistic cofounders who actually want to solve the problem, and you need funding, you would rather abandon it and work on something less conflicted, than sort through all the investors and prospective CEOs who would tell you what you want to hear, while thinking of it as a warm-fuzzy marketing story for the same awful, and ultimately you'd be misleading your users into the same awful easy-money exit endgame.)
The broken execution can include being twisted by perverse incentives.
Example: social media tending to converge on a mix of outrage doom-scrolling for engagement, selling out privacy, and force-feeding ads/ideas.
I ran into the perverse incentives problem, in a different space (not social media). Basically, there's a fairly simple solution to a problem for the majority of users/customers with this problem. But they need assistance at scale, like from a tech company, and there are perverse incentives for a company to pretend to solve the problem, while actively working against solving it. There's big demand for a solution, but most of the money is in not solving it, and it's easy money. One big player even acquires most of the competition, and twists them into the same awfulness, just with different veneers. (And, if you're a pair of idealistic cofounders who actually want to solve the problem, and you need funding, you would rather abandon it and work on something less conflicted, than sort through all the investors and prospective CEOs who would tell you what you want to hear, while thinking of it as a warm-fuzzy marketing story for the same awful, and ultimately you'd be misleading your users into the same awful easy-money exit endgame.)