The Fear Economy
The weirdly intuitive slogan for YC is “make something people want“ which basically just means to make a product that satisfies demand for some useful thing.
When you analyze this statement deeply, you start to realize that there’s an embedded question: what do people want? Most of entrepreneurship is being able to find the answer to this question, quickly, then build products around it. The largest products in the world are built around answering this question correctly and quickly.
So, what do people want?
In my simplified view of the world, there are two things: useful tools to help make them more efficient and a solution to their native built-in fight or flight impulses. In a weird way, even before I was born many of the “more efficient“ problems have been solved. Generally, people aren’t hungry, there is little threat of violence, and the world is more peaceful than ever.
In a world like this then, what are people afraid of?
Our social instincts (being misunderstood or being other)
Financial insecurity
Violence
Then, if you look at some of the biggest businesses today, most of them fall into the solution which is an escape from the fear
Social connection (social media, identity politics)
Financial freedom (Instagram financial influencers, gambling traditional + crypto, the big education complex selling financial freedom through student debt)
Physical safety (some guy with orange skin selling us all walls)
Bucket escapist things (alcohol and drugs, vices)
From building a few things in the world, these escapes have a massive amount more demand than the traditional things like tools that help people do their jobs better. My opinion without backing it by data is that this is a much much larger part of our economy that lets on, and it’s not a good thing.
It’s this sort of fear-based sickness we all have that crosses society. No one is ready for a different solution yet but there needs to be one, otherwise we’ll all just spiral
The other thing (for builders) that’s worth noting is that these businesses are rather not worth building - they take more energy than value they return to you because all of your customers are just escapist seeking people. They’re just not customers you want to have.
I wish I had a better conclusion to this post - it’s still an open question for how we solve this in society, but one that we have a duty to solve for the future.