The digital and the physical

You used to need to know people to run a business. Understand the working dogs of a society even. If not that you needed to be outstanding in resourcefulness in the least. A certain wile was of course the basic necessity without which you'd never make off the base to begin with.

Unlike writers, for example. All a writer needed to do was to write, and the editors, publishers, marketers would take care of the rest. You could hone your craft as a writer without worrying about the other skills you'd need to market your products.

Technology has changed things around. To be a businessperson, you don't necessarily need to know people anymore. Of course, the more successful ones happen to have all the right connections, but we have seen even those that don't have done mightily well. Online platforms have commoditified the other aspects of a business including regulatory compliance, book-keeping, sourcing, supplier relations, customer relations, and what have you. Just make a good product, and you'll get it out is the new mantra.

The difference between a well-written blog and a mass-market successful book was only the marketing. If you squeezed your eyes a bit, you could argue that a book is just a shared blog/pdf with enough rich and the influential recommending it. The difference between something that you just made in your kitchen -- Kombucha for example, since that's what I've been making a lot of these days -- and something you could easily find in the shops was much vaster.

It's that difference that's narrowing which allows all sorts of innovation. But that's not even the end of it. When we talk about 'product', we're talking less and less about physical products as of late, and more about digital products -- applications, movies, software, songs, etecetera. With digital goods, the friction in distribution, sourcing, relations disappears almost entirely and it's almost a pure 'creative good' (such as a book, blog) rather than a product (a showerhead, a bathroom tile, a rubber hose).

The distinction between what something came up with over a weekend and distributes freely only for public usage, and something that has millions of dollars behind it and thousands of customers is getting harder to tease out. Except the marketing of course. The substance, availability, features of the products could be equivalent. The only difference would be that one has the marketing budget equivalent of the GDP of a small nation, and the other is just some girl in her apartment working through the night on her passion project.

I predict in the future different platforms will attempt to arbitrage the differences. If your user is looking for an app, and there's two of them that do exactly the same thing, but one costs $10 (in cash, or in your attention and information) and the other nothing, the user is likely willing to pay a little more than nothing to be regularly recommended the free product. Digital marketplaces are already doing this, but it will get even more common.

The other big changes I see are the opportunities in taking the frictions away so every product can be treated as close to a digital good as possible both from the supplier's point of view, as well as the consumer (oops, 'user') point of view. This allows for quicker iterations on part of the creators, more experimentation and more tailoring to the users' tastes, and offers better, more diverse choices at lower costs for the consumers. In places that are reasonably not-corrupt and don't allow total mono/oligo-poly of retailers, this could lead to an interesting dynamic I'm eager to watch playing out.