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Intentional versus unintentional companiesby@gerstenzang
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Intentional versus unintentional companies

by Sam GerstenzangMarch 15th, 2017
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<a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/intentional" target="_blank">Intentional</a> companies go after understood market needs, and can be created with great will and execution. They take an existing product and make it cheaper, faster, or better. An enterprise storage company that offers storage at one tenth the cost is a deliberate company. A flight search service that finds cheaper flights more quickly is a intentional company. It is a better substitutable good.<br>&nbsp;<br>An unintentional company requires a behavior change in service of an underlying desire. It’s not obvious why this new behavior makes sense at first and is often laughed at. <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/facebook" target="_blank">Facebook</a>, Snapchat, and Twitter are all examples of unintentional companies. The pulse of unintentional product is weak in the early days, and it often takes an irrational founder with great intuition to listen past the preliminary data.<br>&nbsp;<br>Because an intentional company is more rational, the outcomes are usually smaller but more predictable than for unintentional companies. For intentional companies, the capitalist hand has already been at work, turning over the obvious stones. Unintentional companies aren’t discovered through a rational process and because there isn’t a search space that can be defined, when a good unintentional idea is hit upon, it can be truly massive.

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Intentional companies go after understood market needs, and can be created with great will and execution. They take an existing product and make it cheaper, faster, or better. An enterprise storage company that offers storage at one tenth the cost is a deliberate company. A flight search service that finds cheaper flights more quickly is a intentional company. It is a better substitutable good. An unintentional company requires a behavior change in service of an underlying desire. It’s not obvious why this new behavior makes sense at first and is often laughed at. Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter are all examples of unintentional companies. The pulse of unintentional product is weak in the early days, and it often takes an irrational founder with great intuition to listen past the preliminary data. Because an intentional company is more rational, the outcomes are usually smaller but more predictable than for unintentional companies. For intentional companies, the capitalist hand has already been at work, turning over the obvious stones. Unintentional companies aren’t discovered through a rational process and because there isn’t a search space that can be defined, when a good unintentional idea is hit upon, it can be truly massive.

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