It’s significantly easier to ride a market wave than to make a new one. Zoom is an excellent example of this. They’ve tried constantly to push companies to think remote. They attend conferences remotely. They have very lax rules when it comes to going in the office. And their technology, for all intents and purposes, works pretty darn well.
But Zoom just became a household name. And it’s not because they’ve done anything unusual. It’s only because everyone is forced to work from home. No one could’ve predicted this pandemic a year ago. But… it was easy to see this likely trend coming from a few months ago.
New companies should rely on this thought. When you think about attacking a market, you’re typically taught to “take X% of a market Y size” by revolutionizing something inside of that space. But I’m of the opinion that it’s much better to take a large percentage of a new and growing market which is emerging do to societal trends.