The Silicon Valley Mirage: Why Most 'Innovation' is Just Smoke and Mirrors

The Real Path to Disruption Lies in Abstraction, Not Digitization

Digitizing something isn't a value prop. Making an online portal isn't an inherent innovation.

In a world of forms and dashboards, we think that disrupting an antiquated industry, that ironically does use forms and dashboards using ERP systems like Oracle or SalesForce, is to provide better forms and dashboards. Saas is a shitty business to be in for that reason. Most software professionals think that building a functional form and harnessing "data" is a strategy, while they have no thesis on how to make that data more proactive and useful to their customers.

"This industry isn't digitized, as X company, we aim to digitize it and disrupt it"
-Standard Statement from software professionals

Hate to be that guy, but the whole world has been on computers and businesses on servers for a few decades now, and the software does power everything, even if it's over complex spreadsheets to run business processes.

So creating software, with more forms and dashboards, isn't by itself disrupting anything.

Functional requirements are the baseline, the products people rave about doing something else. It's actually really simple. They support someone’s work and even better, they make people not have to think about their work.

This is the reason people criticize spreadsheets for repeatable business processes. Even if they can't articulate why they detest it.

Our instincts tell us: "This should be automated" or "We need a Saas for this"

And a dozen doomed-to-fail startups go forth to create more forms and dashboards to solve something a spreadsheet is supporting just fine.

Even though we might be right, that there has to be a better way to support a business process, why are our go-to answer forms and dashboards?

Don’t get me wrong, forms are a table-stakes requirement when making software, you need systems inputs. But they are foundational elements of an experience, like framing a house, they are not an innovation on their own.

The innovative focus: reduce cognitive load

What do successful businesses have in common? They support work. They fulfill emotional JTBD.

The best ones, remove thinking altogether. The cause of suffering is thinking. Especially thinking about things that do not matter.

Things that someone shouldn’t think about when technology is innovative:

• How do I use this tool?

• What value am I getting out of this tool?

• Why do I feel like I’m doing all this work to get a basic result?

The best companies just do the job for you in half the time of half the effort.

Innovation is when products and services make essential needs more accessible, affordable, approachable, and/or more usable to the point where they become the standard way of doing things.

The invention of the ladder made us not have to think about reaching harder-to-reach fruits.

• Spotify disrupted by removing the need to curate our music, they do it for you.

• Airbnb disrupted travel, they gave us access to property that would have been under-utilized.

• Apple disrupted by removing the barriers to entry to using computing power in individual expression.

• Chat GPT removed the barrier to entry to LLMs.

• Nintendo removed the barrier to entry to triple-A games by making more portable CPU’s and a great handheld experience.

• BetterHelp removed the barriers to entry to access affordable therapy

• Amazon removed the barrier to entry to the world library. And even gave a voice to people to publish.

Those companies actually innovated. They removed the time, effort, and cost barriers to an essential human need. Did they use forms? Hell yeah! Do they have dashboards? when it made sense!

But the thing that anchored All these innovations is a focus on the abstraction of the problem, the barriers to entry to access a service that is essential.