Making our Marq: A New Consumer Curve (Part 1)
Marq is a Q&A platform that rewards users with payouts for investing money in constructive answers. It was founded by active members Marcel and Sohil and is currently in the SkyDeck HotDesk programme.
Humans with human problems
It’s strange that even after all these millennia of being human, our species as a whole still can’t agree on what motivates us to do the things that we do. With the advent of artificial intelligence and technology’s almost inseparable integration into our lives, the question of what makes us uniquely human is something that has been top of mind in geek and political circles.
Tech futurist and a16z cofounder, Marc Andreessen, offers us some solace:
“A world of just computers wouldn’t work… [but] a world of just people could certainly be improved.” — Marc Andreessen¹
There is an oft-quoted pearl of startup wisdom in Silicon Valley: make something people want. Propagated by Y Combinator, this phrase has become gospel for the startup community. Nowadays, we often see other derivatives of this phrase, each with imagery more vivid and intense than the last.
People talk about solving problems that keep people up at night, or ones that light people’s “hair on fire.” In other words, users need your product or they’ll die. To be fair, these analogies have incredible merit. Many successful companies have built amazing products that had people rushing to consume from the very beginning.
But, as counterintuitive as it sounds, maybe not all pressing problems are immediate, “hair on fire” problems. While there is a lot of wisdom behind making something that people want, there are instances where people don’t quite clearly know what they want.
Businesses, on the other hand, couldn’t be more different. We know what businesses want; they want to increase their bottom line. Milton Friedman, the late Nobel Prize-winning economist, plainly states that a corporation’s sole function as a state-chartered legal entity is to increase profits for their shareholders. That’s why B2B products’ value propositions all converge to one ultimate objective — make businesses money.
Conversely, humans are incredibly complex creatures relative to corporations despite our individual size. In fact, leading philosophers of the modern era assert an array of differing views on the core of human nature.
- Friedrich Nietzche: Will to power is the driving force of human behaviour.
- Émile Durkheim: Community membership is what makes an individual human.
- Karl Marx: The need for money is a real human appetite under capitalism.
People want very different things, yet many of our economic models assume human rationality. In reality, we are all these things. We are logical, we are social, we are emotional. Politics and economics, for that reason, are inherently messy — and evidently so throughout history. This makes human problems a much tougher but also far more rewarding puzzle to solve.
My preoccupation with human psychology crossed with behavioural economics was and still is one of my key motivations behind launching Marq, a Q&A platform that rewards users with payouts for investing money in constructive answers. While talking to users and building our product, my friend and cofounder, Sohil, and I wrestled with asking the right question to spearhead our vision and growth. We spent hours debating this one topic in between rounds of watery homemade coffee.
An invisible itch
After much back-and-forth dialogue, we decided to flip the traditional startup question around. Instead of explicitly asking what it is that people want to do, we asked, “How do we make people do what we want?”
This is a question that we unknowingly think about and answer on an almost daily basis from a very early age. As kids, we think about how to convince our parents to buy us a video game. As adolescents, we think about how to get our teachers to excuse our tardiness. And as adults, we think about how to persuade our bosses to give us a raise. Chances are, you’ve probably asked yourself at least one variant of the aforementioned question.
Why, then, don’t we ask this question more when building businesses?
A number of successful “moonshot” companies and innovations answer this very question. They have been predicated on scratching an itch — an invisible one — that consumers never knew that they needed to scratch in the first place.
Here are just a few of these innovations:
- Airbnb: Brian Chesky, cofounder and CEO of Airbnb, describes their product as “the worst idea that ever worked.”² Investors were not sold on the initial idea of people renting out an air mattress to a stranger. The founders, however, saw firsthand the value in the relationships built through this new sharing economy. Today, Airbnb has a $35B valuation.
- SpaceX: A literal moonshot. There was no clear market pull for interplanetary space travel or reusable rocket travel across countries for that matter. Yet, Elon Musk is making these experiences a reality with strong backing after overcoming earlier inertia.
- Compound pulleys: This was the ultimate ancient Greek flex. Archimedes invented this simple machine to single-handedly move a fully loaded three-masted ship on dry land while at a distance. No clear need — King Hieron II just wanted proof that Archimedes could “move the world.”
These innovations created customer demand that never existed before, eventually growing that demand into whole new markets. Some great products don’t get pulled out of the existing market through burning desire. Some innovations, as Musk suggests, would trend to zero if no conscious effort is made.³ Put simply, technological progress in some areas (e.g., outer space) is not inevitable. It takes a large number of people working extremely hard on one thing to make it better.
The relative absence of existing market demand for a product does not mean that the problem it solves is any less significant. Quite the opposite, many of these innovations serve as the technological breakthroughs that generate a new S-curve in humanity’s historical development.
Today, we share our cars and houses with Internet strangers, entrust a private company with America’s future in space, and ride a metal box going up and down buildings with our lives resting in the integrity of simple machines. How absurd.
Maybe we just have to launch something on a new curve and change human behaviour altogether.
The second part of this two-part series, Making our Marq: Social 2.0, will dive into how Sohil and I have approached tackling misinformation — a collective action problem — from the perspective of launching on a new consumer curve.
About Marcel
Marcel studies Political Science and Business Administration at UC Berkeley. Together with Sohil, he cofounded Marq, a Q&A platform that rewards users with payouts for investing money in constructive answers. He makes puns.
Marq is currently in the SkyDeck HotDesk (Spring 2020) programme. The platform is in its alpha stage. Go to https://marq.live/ and enter your email for an invitation to the beta.
References
[1] Last para.: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man
[2] Para. 8: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Sharing-economy-startups-Airbnb-and-Uber-don-t-6079970.php
[3] https://youtu.be/zIwLWfaAg-8?t=2246
Thank you to Sohil Kshirsagar, Anoushka Agrawal, Jennifer Lu, Keshav Rao, and Justin Duan for reading drafts.
