Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
The incremental route
The incremental route boils the product down to what people come for, the camera for Snap and voice for Discord, then looks for other cohorts who could use it. The best signal is people using the product in ways nobody intended, going through extra hoops to do what they want. At Discord that meant communities organizing in larger and larger numbers instead of 20-person gaming friend groups: people voting with their feet.
Working backward
The more innovative route is to look at why the company was built and then think about the future unencumbered by the present. Right now the best way to share a moment is to pull out your phone, aim the camera, and record, which is constrained by existing technology. Picture a child taking its first steps, a concert, something funny on the street: what is the best way to share that with friends? That line of thought leads to something like glasses.
Few people have this blank sheet creativity. Even really creative people tend to remix versions of the present, and many product managers go on an ayahuasca journey or travel to Japan and come back announcing they have solved it.
Why do users who bend a product matter?
MIT's Eric von Hippel built a research program in the 1980s around lead users, people who modify products to meet needs the market has not yet met. His studies found that many successful products began as user modifications. Twitter offers a well-known example. Users invented the at-reply, the hashtag, and the retweet before the company built them into the product.
How did Snap first try camera glasses?
Snap launched Spectacles in September 2016, sunglasses with a built-in camera. Pressing a button on the frame recorded a video clip of about 10 seconds, which synced to the Snapchat app. They first sold through yellow vending machines called Snapbots that appeared at surprise locations. The launch price was 129.99 dollars.
Why is imagining the future so hard?
In a 1994 study in the journal Cognitive Psychology, Thomas Ward asked people to imagine and draw animals living on another planet. Most drew creatures that had eyes, legs, and a symmetrical body, features borrowed from animals on Earth. He called this structured imagination. People tend to build new ideas from the familiar examples already in their heads.
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