Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas

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Original Article: Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas

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How do you come up with fresh, transformative ideas?

“Brainstorming” is hard—staring at a blank whiteboard, wondering whether someone could make a real-life “dark mode” whiteboard, then realizing that’s what a blackboard is, only dustier.

Or the modern version, seventeen pointers flying around a Miro board, zooming to 2000% to read that auto-scaled-down text in each standard-sized virtual sticky-note.

We’re blinded by our daily work: No forest, all trees. It’s too easy to glom onto an idea that’s been knocking around for year, its importance undeservedly increased by the familiarity of repetition. It’s hard to think past the last seven customer interviews or support tickets or sales calls. Those are great for generating tactical ideas that fuel our roadmaps, but they are tiny incrementalisms that cement us into tiny thinking.

The following prompts jostle you out of tiny thinking. Each stretches some dimension of reality to an extreme. So extreme that it is nearly nonsense. But dramatically different perspectives can reveal distinctly new ideas. An idea that would be a 60% solution in an extreme hypothetical case, could be a 2x or even a 10x idea in reality.

Sometimes the extreme is surprisingly appropriate. Unique business models emerge when at least one dimension is so extreme that it defies critics and competitors to even conceive of its possibility1. A fantastic idea fulfilling the right extreme can be a company’s entire strategy, unlocking a long-term competitive moat.

1 All of these were considered impossible barriers or business models, until a company did it anyway and won because of it: Zappos’ free shoe returns 364 days after purchase, Robinhood’s $0 trading fees, Amazon’s free delivery with Prime, Netflix’s mail-order DVD rental, open-source software companies charging for something that’s 100% free and 0% secret intellectual property (now hundreds of billions of dollars in combined public-company value), AirBnB, Uber, and Lyft banking on strangers trusting strangers in the intimate spaces of cars and homes.

It’s worth a try.

10x prices #

If you were forced to increase your prices by 10x, what would you have to do to justify it?

What sort of brand looks and feels like something that expensive? What positioning would you take? How would the design of both the website and the product need to change?

What subset of your market would you have to target? Do they have different problems that need solving, or different needs? Would they consider the high price a positive, because it feeds a need to be seen as someone who is successful, or because they feel “buying from the best” lowers the risk of their decision? What would you need to do for them to be able to display that badge? What sort of relationship would you want to cultivate with each customer?

What expensive services might you need to supply? Human support? Infrastructure? Is it possible for those costs to be “only” 2x or 3x more than today, so that the net impact is massive profitability?

Often early startups charge too little, and established companies struggle to charge more to existing customers. Thinking about what could justify a massive hike, you might be able to do some of those things and justify at least 2x.

No customers #

If all our customers vanished, and we had to earn our growth and brand from scratch, what would we do?

How would we distinguish ourselves with a ...