Making Things People Want vs. Making Things That Alter Thinking

I recently rewrote the interests section of my blog to be more concise. The primary interest I wrote down was “making things that alter thinking at scale.” When I distilled what I believed to be one of my long-term goals I landed on that.

Recently I thought about how this is both similar and different to YC’s goal of “Make something people want”.

I find that successful startups do both. People want it and it changes the way people think. Here are a few examples.

• 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.

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.

Since they both require eachother, in a more abstract sense, we can say they are equivalent. Treating them as equivalent leads to interesting outcomes.

The more something changes the way they think, the more they want it. Think about how Google changed the way we think about learning and accessing new information.

Also, then, asking people “does x change the way you think?” is sometimes a more valuable and better phrased question than “do you want x?”. I think this shift in perspective could also help people escape tarpit ideas, as humans have a hard time figuring out what they actually want.

Because these two are related, I think the best piece of advice from this essay is that if you are trying to get people to want whatever you made, try and get whatever you made to change the way they think.

tl;dr: making things people want and making things that alter thinking are isomorphic to each other