I love this article. It really comes down to eliminating mental barriers that keep your thinking and your goals capped within a limited range.
Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
71–80 of 97 posts
Re: Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
#72Good questions. I particularly like the 10x price one. That might mean 10x revenue or 10% of the customer base for the same revenue.
Yeah, or maybe it's "both." :-)
Which, if your goal is profitability, might be a great thing.
Re: Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
#73Good questions. I particularly like the 10x price one. That might mean 10x revenue or 10% of the customer base for the same revenue.
This applies to the salaries as well :) What do I need to do to get 10x salary this/next year?
This is a really good one. Could also apply the concept to the whole business in keeping with the pattern, i.e. "What if we _had_ to 10x revenue in the next 12 months, no matter the cost or impact on existing customers?"
This might be related to "what if we had to 10x prices," but of course revenue = price X N, so it brings up the N question, which is fantastic to do.
I'll consider how I might be able to add this to the article without too much overlap with "10x prices".
Re: Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
#74If you were never allowed to provide tech support, in any form, what would have to change? Am I the only one who thinks that the answer to that question, for quite a few companies, is, "Nothing. Absolutely nothing. In fact, that's pretty much what we do right now."
The bigger they get, the more true it is.
In B2C, yes; in Enterprise B2B, it's the opposite -- you get dedicated account managers, quarterly business reviews, sometimes even weekly product reviews (we have those with our largest vendor).
Re: Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could test it by offering free memberships to a limited country or number if people.
How would one limit a free offer to a certain country? We could definitely to a user-limited free pass, but we'd want to have it exposed only to new users, so we don't lose existing recurring revenue.
> How would one limit a free offer to a certain country?
You could choose a country with a unique language and limit the free version to that language.
Though I'd question a limitation to a single country itself. Cultural aspects do matter, and by doing so you pin down two variables at once, so the results are much harder to interpret.
Re: Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Au-contraire, I think its naive to think that when such a large fraction of our lives (and economic activity) is built around particular types of for-profit businesses that we can somehow achieve our broader goals without them. We must break that spell. For-profit business are not structured according to some immutable laws of nature. Everything about them is a legal construct and it can be tweaked. Corporate entitie…
Who's this "we" you're referring to that will enact these changes? Is it the shareholders of the companies? That's a no go - they won't go much beyond making token sacrifices for the sake of PR. Is it the government? The regulators and the executives of the companies they regulate are frequently the same people - they do their time in private enterprise and then they become policymakers for the industry they were wor…
By all means go ahead. People thinking and acting on these concerns mostly "have made their money", or at least feel secure enough to do so. The (large) complement of people who didn't are too distracted by daily struggle to relate.
Another reason for empowered individuals to act on their hunches is that there is no sure fire prescription of how to achieve change. We feel that things are "not alright" and we can reasonably suspect "nearby" alternate realities. Yet finding the pathways from A to B is basically by trial-and-error. In such context, the more trials and the more orthogonal to each other, the better.
More systemic processes might be slow but they are not "ineffective". Its a matter of timescale and perspective. The slowest of them all, the educational system, is actually the most effective in the long run.
Re: Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have they fixed the wood burning loophole, where you can burn overseas wood without recognizing any carbon emissions because the carbon accounting places the emissions at the place where the wood was harvested? >In 1996, scientists at the United Nations devised a method to measure global carbon emissions. To simplify the process and avoid double counting, they suggested emissions from burning biomass should be calcul…
I don't think wood-burning is a real emission issue since wood growing/burning is a carbon-cycle and not a fossil taken in the ground and injected forever in the atmosphere... As long as the wood is coming from tree plantations, not from deforestation of course, which I expect to be mostly the case in North America and Europe.
Even if the forest is replanted and eventually stores the same amount of carbon as was released in burning the wood you end up behind. You release a bunch of carbon today and it takes decades for the new growth to recapture that. Plus you burn additional fuel for the harvest, processing, and shipping, which is never recaptured.
Burning and replanting forests is not carbon neutral. Not even close. It's an accounting gimmick that the EU uses to make themselves look good.
Re: Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would ask "When is it justified to put the environment over human life?"
Can you really separate those, given that humans have to live in the environment?
yes you can. Because it will likely be decades before the environment kills people but you can save a life today. Oh, don't drive that ambulance to go pick someone up and rescue them, it pollutes! Where as other solutions may exist for the environment in the future.
Here's another. Maybe no one should go hiking/camping/mountain climbing because the few that need to be rescued generally require cars/helicopters the burn fossil fuels to come to their aid, not to mention all the fossil fuels used to get them to their camp/hike/climb site and all the materials for their gear, all for "entertainment".
Also, you yourself are likely a net negative on the environment. Do you have an obligation to kill yourself?
Re: Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would one limit a free offer to a certain country? We could definitely to a user-limited free pass, but we'd want to have it exposed only to new users, so we don't lose existing recurring revenue.
"We could definitely to a user-limited free pass, but we'd want to have it exposed only to new users, so we don't lose existing recurring revenue." That sounds like a recipe for alienating loyal customers, if they find out they still have to pay, but everyone new does not. Then they will just cancel their subscription and also become "new users".
Yeah, it could burn a lot of goodwill. The other option is to tell existing customers that we're trying out something new and pausing everyone's subscription for 3 months while we see what kind of growth we can get as a free tool. That would incentivize people to spread the word a lot, and if it does go well then we would feel comfortable cutting off the B2C revenue. But it would be weird messaging to hear from a company, which could just be confusing to people.
Re: Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
#80I like this. In the past, we've considered making our B2C products completely free, as a way to drastically increase our rate of adoption and spur further adoption of our B2B product (which is much more lucrative). But we've never pulled the trigger, out of a fear that we'd be giving up existing revenue, and because it would make it hard to start charging again later if we decided it was the wrong decision. Although…
You should look for examples of other companies who did something similar and see how that went. I personally have the feeling that giving away free of charge a previously sold B2C spells the end of that product and is a signal that the product is not commercially viable.
Good point. We don't want to signal that it's not viable, since it absolutely is. We just want to figure out if B2C is a better channel for growth than for revenue, as we'd keep the B2C tools running no matter how much revenue the B2B side brings in. We plan on lowering the price as the B2B side ramps up, but the question we're pondering is whether making B2C free (like we were at launch, when we grew very quickly) would massively accelerate B2B uptake. But we would have to be careful not to send the signal that you mention.