Previously delivery drivers were hired for and delivery offered on a per restaurant basis. We had couriers for general delivery but they were niche specialty providers. Doordash separated delivery from the restaurants and provided a means of tapping into their market. See also Instacart.

Also I would honestly rather add "type:forum" to my searches and search all forums rather than just Reddit. The problem is that Google doesn't seem to provide a way to do this.

Before searching extra results on reddit, we had yahoo LOL

I think that's just more that Urbit isn't a good (or at least mature) product.

FWIW, I feel this quote is often misinterpreted -- too many people take it to mean "If my audience thinks I'm building the wrong thing that's ok -- I must hold my conviction and they'll thank me later". The reality is that any new product is a balance between building something familiar, fulfilling explicit customer desires, and improving in ways they didn't even expect. All of these are important. Maybe we can balance out the Henry Ford quote with this one from Peter Theil:

"No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: it's going to be different, and it must be rooted in today's world."

Not to be pedantic, but there isn’t any evidence he ever actually said that. It’s also used as justification for all sorts of bad business decisions that could have been solved with a tiny bit of research first.

> "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" - Henry Ford

Except that's exactly what people wanted.

Humans settled for combustion engines with all the attendant downsides because it is not possible make a faster horse (or human).

Do you actually believe that this current wave of is no different than previous waves?

I chose Uber because the concept of getting into a strangers car was the first shift of thinking a startup did that came to mind.

The rest I chose are examples from YC as they are the ones with phrase “Make something people want”.

I think if I spent some more time I could have came up with better ones.

Yeahhhhh plus did any of those really change “how people think”? I was expecting some epistemology content, not just “if you’re Uber-successful (heh) you can create a new sub market”. Like,

  For Uber, people wanted an easier way to get around, but, at the same time, people’s thinking shifted away from “why would I want to get into a strangers car?”

  AirBnb shifted thinking away from “why would I let strangers into my house?”.

  Reddit changed the way people interacted online and how online content was aggregated, people often append “reddit” to their google results to get higher quality content.

  DoorDash changed the way people think about takeout and how restaurants monetize their food.

  OpenAI completely shifted how people think about intelligence and the effects of AI on society.

If your mental model does not include some form of making something people want and you are trying to create a startup which has the sole goal of getting people to use and pay for your product, I think you would have a hard time being successful.

Usenet was used by about almost exclusively people with an IT or engineering background.

Reddit is used by a far wider and larger audience, both relatively and absolutely.

> Reddit's only claim to fame is that happened to be there at the moment Digg became unusable.

And up until now every competing Reddit-type effort attracted the wrong crowds.

There may be an opportunity for a new Reddit now that Reddit at scale attracts super young users that aren't as interested in long form discourse. Reddit's desire for growth has alienated a lot of high signal contributors.

There's huge opportunity here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1fb8xll/most_...

> however, it's also better to take advice from people who win instead of those who can over articulate their failures

I didn't even articulate it well. Nobody wants a car, they want what the car gets them? It works even for a house or a beer

It sounds like they want to say they are synonymous. Isomorphic implies that each category has the same[1] internal structure. Given that the author doesn't spend much time developing the ontology of want nor the ontology of thought, it's hard to make an isomorphic connection between the two realms.

For me a stronger essay would be to say, "Give people a reason to change their minds," or "Strong products give people a reason to change their minds." Connecting "I would never get into someone else's car," or "I would never let strangers stay in my home," to reasons why we would change our mind on those topics, is a better conceptual framework for creating things people want.

We can identify loads of things we wouldn't do, and conceive of ideas that might make people change their minds. Even better, we can find pairs of things that people want and the assumptions they have that are preventing them from getting what they want, and create a product that connects the two. Either way, that's not exactly the author's essay.

1. Or for the sake of the grace, similar internal structure.

I agree, it’s a bit of stretch.

In my mind the mapping and inverse mapping were defined in these two paragraphs:

“I think altering thinking at scale requires people wanting that thing, otherwise you wouldn’t get network effects and scaling would be impossible.

Also, I think that making something people wants requires altering the way they think. When you make something new you ask people to reconsider their existing habits and first principles. This mental shift, however small, is what leads to mass adoption and users falling in love with your product.”

It implies that for every thing people want there's a corresponding change to the way they think.

There's a subset where that's true, but "Iso" is a stronger sort of morphism than what we have here. It must preserve structure everywhere to be an isomorphism.