Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea

"Pivot" refers to when a startup changes its business model or product direction, like Justin.tv becoming Twitch.

80% of my exit profits had gone from pivot.

What can we uniquely offer that people are desperate for?

If a customer has the ability to do something other than what you do to solve their problem, they won't be crazy enough to do business with a startup.

The way startups win is because it proposes a radically different future. Disorients the incumbent and chaotically moves people to that different future.

You want to force a choice and not a comparison. If everybody's selling apples, I can't be a 10 times better Apple. I want to be the world's first banana.

If you're living in the future and you notice what's missing, your intuition about what to build is far more likely to be right.

In Maples' framework, "inflections" are major turning points that create new opportunities - like technological breakthroughs, regulatory changes, or shifts in consumer beliefs.

An insight is a non-obvious truth about how one or more inflections can be harnessed to change people's behavior.

An inflection is an external event that creates the potential for radical change in how people think, feel, and act.

You want to construct your experiments so that you're in a position to be surprised.