In the past several days I've seen some very interesting business plans on new services. They all seem to have this central theme about changing people's habits. A new email thing requires a user to create special folders and categories before the service thing works. The 'thing' was really interesting and really good. Another one was a hyper-local search gizmo that required a habit change about how you searched with special keyword modifiers. The results were really good. Another one was using the mobile phone to automate some tasks which also required a change in how the phone was configured (which impacted phone calls). The results here were also really really good.
In each case, I asked the simple question: How are you going to get people to change their habits and do what you are asking? The answers were, at best, weak but more importantly, it pointed out (at least to me) that lots of folks are not factoring in what it takes to actually change somebody's habits.
Consider this massively unscientific study I did in January as part of a class I was teaching.
I asked three sets of 20 people a variation on the issue of closing the bathroom door when you gotta go.
Variation one: You are home along, do you close the door when you gotta go?
Variation two: You are home along with just your cat, do you close the door when you gotta go?
Variation three: You are home along with just your dog, do you close the door when you gotta go?
In almost all cases I got yes answers. Some were funny (I don't want the cat/dog 'getting involved') but most positives were, yeah out of habit.
You aren't Microsoft trying to get the Google habit changed and you've seen how that's going; you are a start-up.
As you think that business plan through, ask yourself what can you do to minimize the disruption of customer's habits.
Makes you wonder how easy it will be for Obama's change plan to succeed..
Posted by: Riaz Kanani | February 19, 2009 at 17:01
Riaz,
I keep politics completely out of this blog but, the thought didn't escape me. Thanks for stopping by.
>R<
Posted by: Rick Segal | February 19, 2009 at 17:07