Look in your pantry.
A surprising amount of what we buy is something we could have made ourselves.
Cocktail sauce is a good example. The basic idea is remarkably simple: tomato-based sauce, horseradish, vinegar, seasoning. (Heinz) Worcestershire sauce is a much more elaborate fermented condiment, but even it is ultimately a collection of ingredients and processes that could theoretically be reproduced at home.
Brownie mix makes the point even more clearly. A typical boxed mix is largely sugar, flour, cocoa, and a handful of other ingredients. Betty Crocker’s current mixes make the composition almost comically obvious on the label. (Betty Crocker)
Yet we buy these things and we fill our pantries with them.
The interesting part is that we are not really buying the ingredients. We are buying the time someone else spent assembling, measuring, packaging, testing, preserving, distributing, and explaining them.
That is convenience. And convenience is a much more fundamental concept in business than we usually give it credit for.
A business exists, in most cases, because there is something someone needs to do that they would rather not spend their own time doing. Even if you are buying a skill you don’t have, you are actually buying the time to have to learn that skill yourself.
Sometimes the thing takes skill. Sometimes it takes equipment. Sometimes it takes capital. Sometimes it takes experience. Sometimes it is simply annoying. And sometimes it takes five minutes away from what you would rather do. So you pay.
It doesn’t matter if it is software, AI, consulting, manufacturing, or physical labor. The implementation changes, but the underlying transaction is consistent.
This may sound like a shameless plug but it is truly the basis for why I published this in a kids book called Erec Makes a Fire almost 10 years ago. The story is intentionally simple because the underlying idea is simple and it is better to ingrain it in a child than repeat it to all the adults. Erec needs to accomplish something, but accomplishing it requires time and effort. The people around him each have different capabilities, and things they spend time doing.
Someone has a problem they could solve it themselves. You make it take less time and they pay you.
This is one of the reasons I think we sometimes misunderstand innovation.
We tend to imagine a business as creating something that did not exist before. That is certainly one kind of business. In reality 99.9% of the time, it’s a derivative. And for good reason – but not this post’s point.
A business takes something that already exists and make it easier, faster, cheaper, closer, reliable and/or understandable.
More convenient.
The product may look like software, a bottle of sauce, a box of brownie mix, or a person showing up at your house with a toolbox. Underneath, the value proposition is the same.
I will spend my time on this so you can spend yours on something else.
And that is actually a beautiful feature of an economy. We do not each have to become good at everything. We don’t need to astound the world with something never seen before. We don’t need to “innovate” beyond what customers have or need.
We are all simply and constantly buying back pieces of our own time. And that has scaled in layers for thousands of years.
The strange thing is that we often forget this when we talk about technology. We ask what AI can create, what software can automate, or what a new company has invented.
A more useful question is often much simpler:
What does this allow someone to stop spending their time doing?
That is where most of the value lives. The product is not always the thing in the box. Sometimes the product is the five minutes you just got back.
