Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Look for early and inevitable
What inevitable means
The point of inevitability is that the thing being described is going to happen in the world either way. A company might make it arrive five or ten years earlier, or might capture the rewards, but conjuring something into being is very hard. So the founder has to have seen what the world will be like and describe it well enough that the investor believes it.
The unbelievable moment
The sign to watch for is a moment in the pitch that almost can't be believed. The advice is to get curious: what did you say, why did you say that, and how confident are you in that?
Customer love
Customer love backs it up. Before joining Instacart, he asked his wife what she thought of it, and she loved it enough that she wouldn't have moved unless Instacart delivered to the new house. That is more than a 70 NPS: it is I can't live without this. It also felt inevitable that people would buy more groceries online.
Why do big ideas sound unbelievable at first?
Everett Rogers' diffusion of innovations, first published in 1962, describes new technologies spreading along an S-shaped curve that begins with a small group of innovators and early adopters. Early in the curve, adoption is tiny, so a prediction that most people will eventually use the thing sounds absurd. The steep part of the curve arrives only after the early adopters have shown that it works.
Why did earlier online grocery attempts fail?
Webvan, founded in 1996, went public in 1999 and built large automated warehouses to fill online grocery orders. It filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Online grocery stayed a small slice of US food sales for years afterward, then grew sharply in 2020.
How does a net promoter score work?
Fred Reichheld introduced it in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article. Customers rate from 0 to 10 how likely they are to recommend a company. Those answering 9 or 10 count as promoters, those answering 0 through 6 count as detractors, and the score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.
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