What do people want?

What do people want?

Steve Jobs once said "the customer doesn't know what he wants until you show it to him". His point was that you must create a need and simultaneously fill it. The sentiment that no one really knows anything has been around for millennia. Nassim Taleb explores thoroughly this on his book "The black swan", which I highly recommend. The book explores unpredictability, once off events and biases. The internet for example is a black swan event because no one could have predicted it prior to the 20th century. The Covid pandemic is another black swan event, nothing like this has ever happened before, it literally stopped life! We didn't know what to do or how to react.

If you had asked people in Henry Fords time what they wanted, they would have replied a faster horse. How about a horse that won't die if you don't feed it or leave it out in the cold? This is the genius of the automobile.

To know what people want is to know what you want. I want a great product or service that will serve my needs. I want great customer service. I want ease of use and I want convenience. I want service, care and respect. If you can fill those needs, I am a customer. A big innovation might make your offering popular but what I listed are the fundamentals. If you can do the fundamentals really well, you can attract a lot of customers. This doesn't require market research. Of course, I am governed by biaes and they dictate my life but human nature still rules. If you can understand people's motivations, that is, people are narcissists and think the world revolves around them, you will do well in business. Cater to the narcissist in the best way possible, this is a psychological urge everyone yearns for - "Just make me feel special, that's all I want. Make me feel good!", that is what people want.