Friday, August 7, 2009

Go for it!



Advice from Paul Graham:

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you’re trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you’re even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what’s the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.



And some more advice..
Another classic way to make something people want is to take a luxury and make it into a commmodity. People must want something if they pay a lot for it. And it is a very rare product that can't be made dramatically cheaper if you try.

This was Henry Ford's plan. He made cars, which had been a luxury item, into a commodity. But the idea is much older than Henry Ford. Water mills transformed mechanical power from a luxury into a commodity, and they were used in the Roman empire. Arguably pastoralism transformed a luxury into a commodity.

When you make something cheaper you can sell more of them. But if you make something dramatically cheaper you often get qualitative changes, because people start to use it in different ways. For example, once computers get so cheap that most people can have one of their own, you can use them as communication devices.

Often to make something dramatically cheaper you have to redefine the problem. The Model T didn't have all the features previous cars did. It only came in black, for example. But it solved the problem people cared most about, which was getting from place to place.



- While the idea of selling large ticket items like cars is fairly unrealistic for us, consider other things that have been made a "commodity" - computers for instance! Telephones, tvs, .. Ok so manufacturing isnt something we would consider? What about piggy backing onto another manufacturer?

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Thanks !