Since people learn through relative comparison I can totally understand how external perceptions must relate your business/project to something. Otherwise you're just too alien to relate to.

Since people learn through relative comparison I can totally understand how external perceptions must relate your business/project to something. Otherwise you're just too alien to relate to.

It still gave me the best blog site list though..

There is also the matter of crowdsourcing- do the decision trees change over time because people can see or not see the wisdom of the crowd- and do you weight the trees to prevent “bad” communal decisions from happening? There is a difference from deciding what I want for lunch and deciding who to vote for- and you could choose to be more or less paternalistic. (either side of the value coin frustrates people, because of how information and its presentation works.)

I like Hunch for buying a book, or cooking dinner. I just can't in good conciseness say use Hunch for some of the other questions like who to vote for…

I alway try not to rename or invent a category unless necessary. Education takes time and resources. If you can leverage an existing one, always better.

btw – kinda like rafer, I thought i understand hunch, but not really, until this post. that's why i went back to it. really like the concept, tho.

First, Flickr has made some enormous contributions to the consumer web. The two most notable for me are 1) popularizing API access to a core application and 2) the advent of “personal” marketing that made the brand approachable (and non-monolithic).

But, Flickr most certainly did NOT create a new category.

Webshots (which began online in 1996) is largely responsible for defining both the pure “photo sharing” vertical as well as ushering in the era of user generated content.

As one of the founders, we were widely distributing and encouraging pure online sharing of images well before digital cameras had even taken hold. In 1999 when we launched personal photo uploads, we chose to make the sharing of photos public by default. It was a fairly arbitrary decision but it was transformative.

By 2003, Webshots was the #1 photo sharing site on comscore and a top 20 media property with more than 50 million registered users–decidedly mainstream. I personally spent many of those years trying to convince photo industry analysts (even before the bloggers had arrived) that it was not about prints but about reach and engagement/activity.

Other than the gripe above, great article!

1. Why even create a new category? Entrepreneurs love to talk about new markets. Investors love to hear about them. This is a common entrepreneurial psychosis. You might do better by positioning the same product in an existing market. See Steve Blank's writings on market type: http://j.mp/zNFOj.

2. How do your customers describe Hunch? Your description of Hunch is a list of features. We can do better than “Beating the drum over and over again until the message gets through.” Users are a good source for positioning information. Even Steve Jobs does it this way: http://j.mp/2JXuv6.

What do you think?

For all that I've read about the distinct kinds of innovation, I think reality is never so clear-cut. The most extreme statement is for a company to say it is solving a problem you didn't even know you had–and which no one else has discovered, let alone tried to solve. That is truly category creation. But I think that even most “disruptive” innovation starts from a known problem, even if it frames it using a different objective function.

What took me so long to understand the functionality was the home page. I realize that your personalization requirements makes the visual quiz critical, but there needs to be some promise of an emotional/intellectual reward for clicking a few times. Even the promise a compare/contrast to other users choices (i.e. the reward of polling widgets) would help.

http://dantiernan.com/blog/?p=18

If I could borrow Hunch for a moment:
I reviewed Hunch, it is its own subcategory. It answers questions of taste, style, some of identity, and some of the moment decisions, that may or may not change and broaden your perceptions. It's mean to crowdsource conceptions of what people like through comparisons, and then reshape them slightly through decision trees based on other similar answers. It will not give you good life advice for emotional moments, or make you feel good about your decision.
Eg:
Hunch can tell you what kind of new breakfast food you will like. Or a different kind of date that you should try for a third date.
Or maybe what book to take on that three hour flight.

It can't resolve how you feel about whether you should get engaged or not. Or convert to a new religion.

Explaining this as a category is very difficult. Why would I need a product to tell me what book I need to read on a flight but doesn't explain to me whether I should join a certain gym to get over a fear of heights? Oddly- those quick decisions have small emotional components that make for huge timewasters, because of the stress involved. Having someone help you along quickly through them saves time. Without being able to understand the category/subcategory- you can't explain that having a decision tree saves time for certain decisions. (but not others.)

Just thinking about this in context to what you've been writing…

Maybe it helps them understand the new concept through an existing category. But believe me once you do that you just cannot appreciate the new concept.

Interesting thought chris, can totally relate to it