Why you should NOT start from scratch

Thomas Thwaites decided to build a toaster from scratch. Like anyone with the same idea, he bought the cheapest toaster and broke it down to its fundamental pieces. He imagined that the toaster was a relatively simple machine and by deconstructing it, he would better understand how the parts meshed and therefore would be able to build the toaster from scratch. Little did he know that the toaster contained more than 500 components of around 100 different materials.

When he was done completely dismantling the toaster he realised that most of the materials were made of either plastic, steel or nickel. He contacted mines for nickel and steel and for plastic he had to settle for melting scrap plastics. By the time he was done, the toaster looked something like this –

Image Credit — Daniel Alexander and taken off Thomas Thwaites’ Website.

The Toaster Project teaches us a very important lesson. Most of the times, starting from scratch may be a bad idea. In his own words, Thomas said — “I realized that if you started absolutely from scratch you could easily spend your life making a toaster.”

We, at MindIQ, are solving a problem arising out of a similar mentality. We want your businesses to thrive. The tried and tested method to make a business thrive is to truly understand customers and their needs. These days creating mobile apps seems to be the most common way to achieve this. This is a “starting-from-scratch” mentality. Creating mobile apps ignores the vast reach of messaging apps like Whatsapp, Telegram, Skype, etc. as platforms for customer engagement.

We believe that conversational commerce is the future of e-commerce, and we aim to democratize the space by making it as simple as possible for a business to engage with customers via these messaging platforms. We help businesses create business bots that engage with customers. Here’s a sneak peak of what we’re helping businesses achieve —

To know more about how MindIQ is establishing its footprint in the conversational commerce space, check out our video and our blog.

Footnotes:

1. The information for this blog post was collected off Thomas Thwaites TED Talk.