Why We Don't Want to Sign-up for The Paid Version

Price-tags are the first filter. Obviously features and benefits are important, but one thing hasn't changed and that is in the majority of time: value is still the determining factor.

The younger generation, that came of age during the recent recession, had scary dinner time conversations about prices and value as they watched their parents net worth fall by half or more.

Broke parents and college graduates with huge debts flipping burgers at McDonalds put one core idea into everyone's head. I better get some bank, quick. Stuff has to be worth its tag.

Purchases rarely happen without research and why would they. There is a plethora of information at your fingertips. Prices of products and services, reviews, testimonials of micro influencers, unboxing videos, competitor ads, value/fact checks, you name it - all accessible with one click of a button.

I.e. you got a job, and then another one. (And another one.) Technology certainly made this easier as well. You don't need a very sophisticated entrepreneurial mindset anymore, because the infrastructure is handed to you. Drive an Uber, rent out an Airbnb, sell (i.e. flip) stuff on eBay, build your own chatbots, make $10.000 winning a single coding competition or even 3 million dollars by playing video games.

Real entrepreneurs actualize, think outside of the box, and go through a lot of trial and error. The returns are huge, but so are the losses. And why go through this painstaking process when there are so many easy alternatives?

This, combined with the hype around entrepreneurialism, has led to everyone 'starting their own business'. For many this means picking something up, try it out, and put it down 5 minutes later. Not a good recipe for success, but when millions of people do it repeatedly and there is a lot of money in the system simultaneously, it still works.

It just so happens that I wrote this article about 2 months ago and boy have things changed. A virus hit and the world went bonkers. We knew the virus was coming, the fatality rate is about 0.1% (basically on the same level as the sniffles) yet the economy got shut down harddd.

Quite a few shut-ins might not even notice anything is wrong and wonder why their favorite online game's servers are suddenly so packed.

This is not to judge and in all honesty, the topic has been covered enough by this point - but Entrepreneurism and... let's call it "remote-adoption" has skyrocketed and from a pure economical standpoint, this is exciting.

"Remote jobs", "jobs to do at home" and so forth are mostly very freelance'ish or come with a sort of build-a-company-attitude. Your own webpage, dropshipping, flipping things, translating, coding, you name it. All of these sectors have gained a lot of attention and on top of that - a lot of things have "gone remote" that previously weren't. People adapt, and so do companies.

Not to forget, the amount of distraction! CRISPR is making progress to a degree where we can realistically achieve immortality, heal all diseases and that kind of stuff - and it flies completely under the radar. Cool Japan Holdings (it had to be the Japanese of course) invent futuristic magnetic bikes (Tron anyone?), Uniworld.io's new Blockchain concept can handle millions of transactions per second, and nobody heard of it. The digital Yuan is actually being deployed and barely anyone makes a fuss. It's like aliens could land and there would at best be this one weird dude on randomnews99.com writing about it.

Now I don't want to play the virus up, down or anything really, but IF some mega-super-duper-deadly diseases hit us NOW, we would be far better prepared. Imagine COVID-19's fatality rate was 10%. Or even 30. It's like we had a training. Remember the duck & cover ads? That sort of thing. + The amount of new opportunities for people in wheelchairs, single parents (etc, etc) has gone through the roof! (Or rather under?).

Even if there isn't much discipline, this environment still led to many people trying out things and sometimes they even stick with it. Companies have used this trend leading to affiliate and partnership programs all over the place. A confusing 'C2B' model was born.

The 'is it worth it' mindset dominates. People look at how they spend their money as well as their time. Brands including universities have lost a lot of their brand-value and associated status.

Sometimes brands are even looked down upon. One example is the case where people wore Gucci clothes (sometimes counterfeits sometimes not) despite being in a financially tight spot to 'fake it till you make it' to the degree where it became a trashy thing to do to wear this brand.