Make people lazy, and you’ll be a millionaire.
Here’s one true fact about people : They love being lazy. How can you leverage that to make money? I say, there are tons of ways to do it! Well, If you haven’t looked at this world closely enough — Lets look at it right now.
Most of the inventions in this world just fit into these two categories :
#1 — They make you lazy.
#2 — They save your time. — At least few hours every week.
Lets look at Cars for example — If you want to go six blocks away — Most of us drive. We never walk or ride a bike when we know that will make us healthy. Surprise, surprise — General Motors, Ford, Hyundai — All of them make billions making cars. They make truck loads of money just by making products which makes people productive and saves their customers some time every single day.
Lets look at couple of more examples — Computers, Internet and more! Look at Microsoft — they make billions selling software that saves people time, Amazon.com — they make truckloads by making people lazy, and there are not just one or two examples of this — there are tons! From consumer electronics to cars, from the invention of the wheel to the internet. We build products that saves people time and makes them productive.
So, How can you leverage this to make your product? Build something that just saves your customers a couple of hours every single week. Look at the world around you, there are tons of things people waste their productive time on.
Lets take an example, You’re building an online tool which saves developers couple of hours of his time every week. (I’m sorry for this example, I’m a developer myself and I cannot think of a better example). So you’re building a developer productivity tool. Lets say your market is 10 million developers and per hour cost of these developers is anywhere from 40$-60$. If you even save a developer just a couple of hours every week and you capture just 1% of this market then you save your customers more than 100,000 Developers * 2 Hours = 200,000 Hours/week. That’s HUGE! and How do you make money? Well, for that lets look at how much you save money for your customers:
200,000 hours * 40$/hr (Mean Developer Cost)= 8 Million $ / week. — Well, That’s how much you save!
and if you charge them anywhere from 10$ — 20$ per hour saved — They’ll come running to you with their cash packed wallets to buy your product.
So if you just charge 10$/hour — You make : 200,000 hours * 10$ = 2 Million / week. Well, that looks perfect to be true right? No. Its actually true. Microsoft Visual Studio is a perfect example for this. Look at Parse.com, Firebase, and even cloud platforms like Windows Azure, or Amazon Web Services. — They are actually making truckloads right now.
In conclusion, build a product that saves people their precious time or/and make them lazy, because that’s where you know the money is.
