TALE: Discover 100 Possible Themes Together

Published in

TALE500

5 min readJan 12, 2023

Produce Significant Insight Collectively!

TALE stands for Thematic Analysis Learning Engagement. TALE was launched as a new knowledge center for the Thematic Engagement project.

Thematic Engagement refers to the “Person — Theme” relationship and interaction.

As mentioned in the previous post, the development of a theme is a long-term large collaborative project of “formation of concept” or a social movement.

The project requires many people to contribute their passion and talent to debate, define, develop, etc.

In order to accelerate knowledge innovation and cultural innovation, TALE will offer open-source service of thematic discovery.

TALE will produce Possible Themes as Significant Insight for knowledge creators and cultural changemakers.

If you are a knowledge creator or a cultural changemaker, you can take these possible themes and use them for your projects.

What does it look like?

See the example of a possible theme below.

The above picture shows a possible theme called “Horizontal Platform Strategy”.

In a previous post TALE: Find 100 Novel Themes and their Communities, I introduced an important theoretical resource behind TALE: The “Project Engagement” approach and Project-oriented Activity Theory in general.

According to the approach, there are three phases of the formation of concepts:

Phase 1: Initialization;
Phase 2: Objectification;
Phase 3: Institutionalization.

Also, there are three aspects of objectification of a concept: symbolic, instrumental, and practical.

The Possible Themes are products of the Symbolic Objectification movement.

TALE uses a cover image to represent a Possible Theme. The picture below is an outcome of Symbolic Objectification.

Verbal: We use “Horizontal Platform Strategy” to name a new possible theme.
Visual: We use a picture to represent the meaning of a long-term journey of building a horizontal platform.

Since a theme is a formation of a concept and it is a large collaborative project. TALE will release the theme “Horizontal Platform Strategy” to the public domain.

Anyone can contribute to the development of the theme of “Horizontal Platform Strategy”.

First Contributor: Anthony Pierri

In fact, the theme of “Horizontal Platform Strategy” was born from a micro collaborative project between Oliver Ding and Anthony Pierri.

I’d like to claim that Anthony Pierri is the first contributor to the theme of “Horizontal Platform Strategy”.

One month ago, Anthony Pierri published a post on Linkedin. Let’s quote his post for our discussion.

“Product-Market-Fit” is a bit of a misnomer…
For horizontal products, it’s more accurate to call it Product-MARKETS-fit.
— — — — — — — —
Quick refresher…
Horizontal Products
→ products that serve many industries, personas, use cases
→ usually start as point-solutions w/ PLG acquisition strategy
→ ex: Asana (to-do’s), Notion (wikis/docs), Airtable (database)
— — — — — — — —
Upside of Horizontal Products
✅ MASSIVE TAM
✅ more use cases = more market segments
Downsides of Horizontal Products
❌ product-market-fit with ONE MARKET is extremely hard
❌ nailing product-MARKETS-fit is even harder
— — — — — — — —
In the example of Airtable, they list six primary use-cases on their website.
This is six different market segments!
(or 18 if divided by SMB, mid-market, and enterprise 🤯)
All 18 markets require their own go-to-market strategies!
Airtable can afford this, but you as a startup cannot.
Solution?
→ Focus your go-to-market strategy on one market at a time

Today I saw this post and made a comment:

This is a great post. Horizontal Products always lead to Platforms.
We need a brand new systematic thinking (or a new theory) about “Horizontal Platform Strategy”.

Anthony Pierri replied it:

Thanks Oliver! And I’d love to see what you come with around that!

This is a micro-collaborative project. This is the beginning of a large collaborative project for the theme of “Horizontal Platform Strategy”.

In a 2010 book titled An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity, Andy Blunden gives us an archetypal unit of Project. See the diagram below.

Source: An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity (2010, p.315)

The rich context of the notion of collaboration also brings to light more complex relationships. The notions of hierarchy, command, division of labor, cooperation, exchange, service, attribution, exploitation, dependence, solidarity, and more can all be studied in the context of just two individuals working together in a common project. And yet almost all the mysteries of social science as well as a good part of psychology are contained in this archetypal unit: two people working together in a common project.” (2010, p.315)

Now, the theme of “Horizontal Platform Strategy” has passed the stage of Initialization with an outcome of the Symbolic Objectification movement.

You are welcome to join the project and work on other movements of Objectification.

Discover 100 Possible Themes Together

This post sets a process for producing a Possible Theme.

TALE aims to build a list of 100 possible themes for knowledge creators and cultural changemakers.

You are welcome to join the TALE community.

If you are passionate about producing possible themes, you can leave a comment or DM me on Linkedin.

TALE: Discover 100 Possible Themes Together

First Contributor: Anthony Pierri

Discover 100 Possible Themes Together

Related Articles

Written by Oliver Ding