Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Watch where people jump through hoops
Watching the workarounds
Customers use products in ways nobody intended, for good or bad. So the Claude Code and Co-work teams watch for emerging behavior, call it latent demand, and form a hypothesis about it.
How Co-work began
Co-work came out of exactly this. Many people who were not coders were using Claude Code, so the team asked how to make that experience better for them.
Small business plugins
Claude for small business followed the same pattern. Small business owners kept asking whether a particular plugin existed, and finding it meant going and searching. Now the plugins are bundled, with a toggle inside Co-work, and the team running Co-work sessions with small businesses probably spotted the efficiency gain.
Why do users invent new uses for products?
MIT professor Eric von Hippel found in studies of innovation that users, not manufacturers, developed many of the important modifications to products. He called the most inventive among them lead users, because they feel a need before the broader market does. They hack and adapt what exists since nothing built for their need is on sale. Companies that watch these users see demand before it is obvious in sales.
How did Post-it Notes come from a misuse?
Spencer Silver, a chemist at 3M, developed a weak, reusable adhesive in 1968 that had no obvious use. Art Fry, another 3M employee, began using samples of it in the mid-1970s to keep bookmarks in his church hymnbook from falling out. That use showed what the adhesive was good for. 3M sold Post-it Notes nationally in the United States starting in 1980.
What are desire paths?
A desire path is a worn track across grass or dirt where people walk because it is the shortest route, even though no path was planned there. Urban planners and landscape architects use them as a record of how people actually move. Some campuses wait to see where paths form before paving walkways. The same idea applies to software, where repeated workarounds show a missing feature.
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