Dark Demands and Needs Expansion

Demands that contains very huge value is always dark demands. Actually, it is not known by many people, not very clear and not found by many people.

There is two bright demands.

1. Many teams are working on that and getting some results.

2. Everyone cannot solve that problem such as pension, clean energy, star immigration and etc.

We can just simply consider the bright demands at first. Basically it can be divided as two kinds. One is like many people already know and there are some achievements there such as how to get a cab. On the aspects of food, clothing, shelter and transportation, many solutions has been developed or many teams are working hard on them but still no a great result.

The other one is like many people know but cannot be solved by a short time such as pension. The ageing of our society is becoming a serious problem but the birth rate is going down. On one hand, young people have to work and create value to society in order to feed the elders. On the other hand, elders need cares from young people. That’s why many companies are inventing robots to solve this problem. It also happens on clean energy. I just saw a comic which was drawn that President Obama was climbing a ladder. This side is coal energy and the opposite side is clean energy. The ladder is not long enough to get the opposite side but he said we must have to get there though obviously he could not. The connection of the gap between traditional energy and clean energy still has problems. As for the star immigration, this may be the final issue of human beings. Although we cannot die with the earth, I believe our grandson’s grandson cannot see the solution during their lives.

Dark demands is a REAL opportunity.

・Able to get an advantage of early development because no one turns attention to that.

・Able to be aware of more and more dark demands after reaching users to avoid competition of new players.

Comparatively, the dark demands that no one pay attentions to are great opportunities to be made use of. One is that because we find it and do it first when no one knows it, we can get an advantage of early development. The other one is that you can find more deeper demands when you are digging out dark demands. When Kuaidi Dache began to developing a solution to grab a taxi, they also did not know whether to focus on high-end private taxi or ordinary taxi. Because no one do the ordinary one at that time, they decided to do the ordinary one. During the developing process, you can find out many demands can be dig out such as how to match customers and how to match drivers.

Base on their experiences, in China, if you set your destination and send it to the driver before you grab a taxi, the efficiency of management is nearly two times of Uber. Uber is just like user only push one button to grab a taxi and no need to set destination. The difference is like if you set a very far place as destination like airport and train station, drivers will compete to get your order because there will be more sales and profits they can get. If the destination is not far away, this will be divided as two situation. One is that the driver is on the same way with you. The other one is that the driver is just near your place and he can get a subsidy from the company. The result is that they use same money to get two times of orders or satisfaction of users. That’s why the efficiency of the whole management is very high. Actually there are still a lot of details and small things there. It is not only to give coupons and discounts to customers. This kind of things are be found in the management during digging out the dark demands gradually.

So how can we discover dark demands that has values? There are mainly two methods. One is to find a default defects that everyone has already known. That means it is not a good thing like you will pass a way which has many potholes, but you don’t care about it too much because it takes you not so many time to pass that way, then it becomes a part of your life. But if someone fills the potholes and make the way flat, everyone will still feel this is a great work. One more example is iPhone. Before the release of iPhone, many people were using pam. Later pam release its mobile version and it was convenient. Actually it went ahead of Nokia at that time and acted like an iPhone. The difference between pam and iPhone is pam did not support finger touch function and web browser like you double click somewhere then that part will be expanded. These points made iPhone has a huge dark demands at that time.

360 anti-virus software is same. Windows gets much better today, but early Windows versions still have many bugs. Especially in China, there are many “pirate version” with many “strange” pre-installed softwares. Because of this, a big demand was born that many people wanted to have a band aids for their weak system.

After satisfying a demand, what kind of problems will happen when dig out and manage it? The point is to dig out the deeper demand unceasingly or to find out a more hidden demand. When communicate with users, a lot of clear feedbacks will be received and they can be solved easily. But you should noticed that these feedbacks may bring you to a trap. For example, users always complained about too many self-shot photos at FML. They complained that these photos has no relationship with FML so they didn’t like these posts. The FML team worked very hard to delete these posts but they found after they filtered these posts, users lost their passion to post on FML. Then the the PV also decreased. Therefore, actually users didn’t really have no patience about these posts, they just thought this kind of posts couldn’t be so many. So we can find that the real value of FML is to show that is a community with “real” people. There are many real lives, real photos and real problems. What we need to do is not to only follow what users say but do find the real dark demands behind them.

Keep discovering dark demands.

An Apple — what users want to see (what do their brains need)

・Freshness

・Something has value

・Video>Picture>Words

What users want to see or what do our brains need? First one is freshness. Our brains need fresh things because it don’t like repeated things. We have to keep updating fresh contents more enough everyday. Second one is value. There are many kinds of things have values such as some hints, something interesting and even something you feel as yourself. Third one is about media format. Visual things are better than abstract things because our brain solve visual issues at first, then transfer them to a strong sense and calculation ability. Nearly 40~50% of our brain space is used to solve visual things and very small part to solve abstract things. That’s why we prefer to watching vivid video,then photos, and then letters at last. The whole recent trend is also become stronger and stronger on video service.

Needs expansion.

・From local users

・From others

The next problem is dark needs begins to expand when they are discovered. Needs expansion can be almost divided as two kinds, personally. One kind is from local users. They are using the product and know the needs very well. They become fans of the website and promote to their friends. But other users may think A is not good enough, so they go out to make B even B is nearly same with A. These kind of people are called followers.

However, there are too many entrepreneurs now. With the startup environment gets better, everyone can feel the competition. Unlike the past, no one would join the business you worked after several years. Nowadays, everything is worked by many people. That makes the dark needs become not enough. So what should we do to solve this problem?

Obviously, there is no good method. What we need to do is to think of the business again and decide the next step.

How long do the followers need to understand and develop the product?

During that time, can we build some “walls” to prevent them?

If a big company do a same product with you, can you bear the pressure?

What can media bring to you? Investment, new customers or help you to expand needs?

Is it better to watch others to become their follower?