What's your delta? Whats the difference between you and the status quo?
Kunal Shah has popularized the idea that startups and innovators need to deliver a delta 4 experience.
This concept encapsulates the dramatic disparity necessary between the experience of using your product and the status quo in order for you to have a category-defining product opportunity.
On a scale of 1-10, your product needs to surpass your customer’s current solution by at least 4/10.
What's the one thing you deliver that your customers can't unsee?
- For Airbnb it’s “why stay in the same hotel everywhere in the world when I can live like a local?”
- For Bushel it’s “why use a cumbersome paper-based scale ticket when I can use a seamless digital one on my phone?”
- For SWAN Systems it's “why waste time chasing down disparate water measurements when I could seamlessly turn those measurements into manageable business outcomes?”
- For SwarmFarm Robotics it’s “why trap yourself in the cab of an enormous tractor that compacts your soils when you could actually be farming?”
Merely being better than the status quo is insufficient - you need to be so different that the question “how does this compare to the incumbent?” becomes irrelevant.
Average companies market towards comparison. Great companies force a choice.
The agtech market is no longer supporting average, you have to be great.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.