Douglas Adams was hilarious. His writing is hilarious-er today than when it was written.
is written by who has been listening to book on tape Douglas Adams since he was a wee lad.One of the funniest things he ever wrote about was fire. Specifically, he had his characters—in the BBC radio drama version of the HHGTTG second book— transported back in time to an early version of the earth, and that planet was colonized by a bunch of people who previously been in marketing. I’m going to link to the book here, but what followers is my paraphrase for memory of one of the most memorable books of all time…
These mid-level sales and marketing executives are trying to decide on “what to do” to create the future of the prehistoric earth. And they got around to debating what to do about inventing fire…
Mayor:
“What about this fire thing? Very exciting.”
Marketing Executive:
“When you've been in marketing as long as I have, you learn that no product should introduced without doing thorough market research.”
Ford Prefect:
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Marketing Executive:
“What do people want from fire? How did they relate to it? We need to understand the brand story for fire before we can successfully introduce it.”
Disgusted and exhausted, Ford prefect responds:
“go stick it up your nose!”
Lacking any sense of irony, the marketing executive responds:
“this is my precisely my point, do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?”
Let's talk about fire
Like it a piece of technology and an innovation, and imagine it's new.
You wouldn't demonstrate fire with marketing brochures. You wouldn't ask people—pensively —what they “thought about fire.”
You would demonstrate fire. You would pull out a torch, light a Spark, and dazzle people.
Dazzle them with the ability to see when it is dark. You don’t need a focus group.
Fire is the difference between life and death. There “demo day” for fire with words or explanation is close to what just looking at actual fire can do—the best pitch ever will be less “wow” than literally just burning pitch.
It is light in the darkness. Marketing is a way to convince people that marginal improvements are important. The disruptive innovation of fire? It doesn't need a marketing department. It burns the whole goddamn marketing department down, if you let it.
It is the ability to not die, when it is so cold that you'll freeze to death otherwise.
It has risks…of destroying everything you love.
It also prevents death by parasitic disease. It makes food safe. It makes it taste better. Fire Cauterizes wounds.
It is disruptive. It will burn down whole forests. It will burn down your home. It will burn down your world. And it will make new things possible.
It is a source of unimaginable suffering. When we were forced, as humans, to consider hell, the Devil, the worst things ever, we included eternal fire as a punishment. Our salvation from the darkness of night and our imagined damnation? They were made of the same thing.
It is vengeance, it is change, it is life, and it is death. The combination of carbon, oxygen and heat, in a way that creates water. The term, in chemistry class, is combustion.
It is the beginning of all things, and it is the end of everything else. Humans have had a choice of a world ended with ice, and we chose fire: over again. We chose fire—for all its risks.
It is the definition of dangerous. It could destroy everything. It has destroyed everything. It will do so again. It’s the most dangerous made manifest.
And none of us— I challenge anybody anywhere—would give up fire. We never choose to do without this most disruptive and dangerous innovation. I guarantee you, given the choice of fire or no fire ever again, every human would always choose access to fire. Without it, nothing changes for the better, and we are in the darkness, alone, powerless, and freezing to death.
That is a lot of things…but it's product market fit at a primal level. Remember that feeling? That product-market fit is the kind of fit that we should aim for—AI marketers figured that out, and they warned us about how dangerous it was. They warned us it could end the world.
Either your product is fire, and no one would ever do without it, no matter how dangerous it is, or they wouldn't. Or, it's not fire at all. Then, you have to spend a lot of money on marketing to convince people that it might be.
There are endless reasons to say no to things that are not fire. But there is no compelling argument against fire, that's the power of a great innovation. It must be managed, the risk mitigated, but never abandoned.
For innovators, it’s this standard—fire—of disruptive technology that we should, ahem, get all hot and bothered about. We should be afraid it might burn us, not hopeful we will warm to the idea. Go fire, or go home, but know the difference.
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