There’s a marketing problem, not a tech one Pt. I
Numbers are hard to ignore. Mobile numbers are bad, and it feels like the problem is only getting worse. The problem is not for a lack of trying.
Storm clouds are forming around the early tech-space which have been forecasted for the last 24+ months. Here is a relevant excerpt from Fred Wilson’s piece on the subject:
The top 6 mobile apps and 8 of the top 9 are owned by Facebook and Google. 10 of the top 12 mobile apps are owned by Apple, Facebook, and Google.
There isn’t a single “startup” on that list and the youngest company on that list is Snapchat which is now over four years old.
We are now well into a consolidation phase where the strong are getting stronger and it is harder than ever to build a large consumer user base.
Power law distribution created by the unprecedented scale the companies at the top can acquire, react, and distribute. People believe mobile start-up innovation is dead or dying on the consumer end of things because companies have no way to reach a large consumer base. This is particularly distressing because in the not-too-distant past if you built something badass, that might be enough, it would go.
My perspective, which is not radical, is the issue is not a technical innovation one: start-ups, individuals, and groups of friends are pumping out cool software at a faster rate than ever before. It has become super easy to build stuff, and the opportunity exists with no substantial capital expenditure to deploy solutions at anything. Some of it’s compelling and some of it’s crap, but either way it suffers from a marketing problem.
We are living in an attention deficit society. There is just simply too much out there, particularly on mobile, where real estate is costly. The sheer volume of videos, pictures, articles, posts, and tweets is astounding. Every individual is an artist, photographer, director, writer, thinker, tinkerer, maker, and voice. This evolution of access perfectly explains the power of ranking, curating, and list platforms. Listing provides a simple way to weed through the noise: the outliers create or float content so the masses don’t have to. This is a long trend in humanity (word to the agora), technology simply provides a distributed framework for it, partially from necessity.
In general, people will only use a small number of applications on their phone. To enter regular rotation an application must provide overwhelming utility. In some instances this comes in the form of a service provider for a pain point existing in a particular habit or niche. A narrow target, it turns out, is easier to train your sights on.
However, niche products most certainly don’t directly equate to mass adoption. One innovation mindset of the last decade is to deploy with a wedge strategy: break into a small market and then piggyback to the next logical iteration with an eye to solving for anyone. Think Facebook at just Harvard to all college campuses to high schools to everyone.
Another innovation mindset is to be an expert: operators should solve their own problems in a domain they’re a master of. The expert strategy works because these operators have secrets; they know their space better than anyone. This all makes a tremendous amount of sense to me.
One issue with increasingly solving problems for oneself, and niches operators already understand, is that innovation unfairly favors the top of the market. Those easy to use development tools are more readily accessible to the top of the market and the familiarity with entrepreneurship, let alone the comfortability to take a leap. This results in a ridiculously deep deployment of solutions to problems felt at the top of the market. The potency of a solution is diluted, the signal is lost in the noise.
My theory is if you can create any solution for real people, you can establish outsize utility. And by ‘real’, I mean the folks outside of those on producthunt or in the Bubble sucking down and spitting out tech products like a fresh cup of suds. Actual people who have smartphones and very real problems not often felt by the privileged/quirky entrepreneurs chasing deep swings and home runs. To be an operator in this realm is tricky: on the one hand you are likely working to solve a problem you are not an expert on and on the other (my American Studies degree is glaring at me from across the room) you run the risk of otherizing your potential constituents.
However, these ventures hold two powerful advantages: the chance to build something that matters and a more than slight advantage in the competition for attention. From an investor standpoint, there is no obvious way to determine who is best poised to navigate these waters. One theory: a trusted navigator (domain expertise) paired with an expert boatbuilder (‘shipping’ the product). Another theory: scrappy and intellectually curious folks who possess the wherewithal to build something with empathy.
The first ingredient to breaking the mobile downturn is focusing on solutions for real people. The second ingredient is to use those constituents to garner a wider audience, which is what I’ll talk about it in Pt. II.
