Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Fire bullets before cannonballs
The cannonball analogy
Picture a ship bearing down on you and a limited supply of gunpowder. Put it all in one cannonball and a miss leaves you with nothing. Put a little in a bullet instead and you miss by 30 degrees, recalibrate, miss by 10, recalibrate again, and hit the side of the ship. Now the gunpowder goes into a cannonball fired on a calibrated line of sight.
What winners did differently
The companies that won big fired bullets first and converted to a cannonball once they had validation. The ability to scale the right innovations separated them, with little evidence that pioneering innovators came out ahead. The comparison companies fired too few bullets, failed to convert when the big bet came, or fired big uncalibrated cannonballs, which was their most constant mistake and correlated with ending up in a doom loop.
The iPod as a bullet
Apple's iPod began as a bullet. A 2002 or 2003 annual report gave it about three sentences as an extension of the digital hub strategy. Then Apple put iTunes on Windows machines, people who had never used a Macintosh wanted it, and the empirical validation turned it into the cannonball. Some bullets never merit one, like the digital watches Intel tried, and a bullet has to be fired well so that a miss means the idea itself failed.
How did the iPod become a hit?
The iPod launched in October 2001 and worked only with Macintosh computers. A version compatible with Windows followed in 2002, and iTunes for Windows arrived in October 2003. Those moves opened the product to the far larger base of Windows users, and the iPod's sales climbed steeply afterward.
How did Intel's digital watch venture end?
Intel bought a watch maker named Microma in 1972 and sold digital watches under that name. The watches competed against cheap digital models from consumer electronics firms, and Microma lost money. Intel sold the business to Timex in the late 1970s and went back to making chips.
Where does the bullets-and-cannonballs idea come from?
Jim Collins and Morten Hansen presented it in their 2011 book Great by Choice. The book studied companies that beat their industries by at least 10 times over 15 years in unstable fields. It contrasts them with comparison companies that made large bets without first testing them.
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