Slice of time

A mental model to figure out how easy it will be for someone to adopt a product or service.

Background

Every one of us has 24 hours to spend each day. We have no more and no less no matter what our location, station, or aspiration. The ordinariness of this observation belies its power. This observation tells us that if we want someone to adopt our product or service, we are asking them to devote a slice of their time for us and do so with some regularity. It becomes obvious that this is a huge ask when we break down what most people's day is actually like.

Most of us sleep 6-8 hours. Travel to and from our office or school takes up another 1-2 hours. Work or school is another 6-10 hours. Food, hygiene, and other basic needs take up an 1 hour. This means most people have about 6 hours for everything else - spending time with family and friends, hobbies, buying groceries, cooking, ... you get the picture. This slice of time is usually the one we spend on entertainment - social media, messaging, online video, gaming, and so on.

When we see the world this way, we see our customers not as an abstract persona or an even more abstract user ID but as a collection of activities, moments, choices. And slices of time. We realise that we are not being compared to another competitor but slotted into some part of the day in between other activities that they are already doing.

Applications

B2C products

I am fortunate to meet a lot of early-stage founders. They are passionate about their ideas and knowledgeable about the industry, competing products, and customer expectations. However, I see many of them not applying this mental model. This is especially important in the B2C world.

A B2C product is almost always used outside the workplace, before or after work. This means a B2C product is not competing with other similar apps but with everything else the customer can do in their 6 remaining hours of leisure. Founders see the enormity of the challenge ahead of them when they realise that they compete with sleep, Netflix, WhatsApp, Tinder, ... for time in their user's life.

Knowing this does not mean we should give up and not build a B2C app. Instead, we should use this knowledge to hone in on precise behavioural quirks of a subset of users where we can lodge ourselves firmly. This is where focus becomes essential. Instead of targeting everyone, we should solve very specific problems faced by a niche for whom we can predict the time of the day when we will get our slice of time. A balding man in his early forties while combing his hair, a hardworking young professional going to work daily with groggy eyes, a student preparing for a competitive exam, a pregnant lady in her final trimester, ... every one of these has the potential to create a big business if we can win a slice of their time predictably and repeatedly.

B2B products

B2B products have an easier time because they are going after customers who absolutely have to spend 6-8 hours at work every day doing a somewhat fixed set of tasks. However, this does not mean every B2B product will automatically succeed just because we have a target persona. An important question to ask is if our product replaces something customers already do or adds something to an already busy schedule.

Many products seem perfectly useful when we think about them logically. However, they find it very hard to win new customers or get user adoption. Companies that do get traction almost universally take an existing process and make it better. This also relates to the vitamin vs. painkiller mental model. Vitamin products are aspirational, make customers' lives better, but might not get adoption. Painkillers are essential, solve an immediate problem, and will get adoption even if the product has some flaws. A key insight is improving something a customer is already doing rather than making them do something totally new for which they do not have the time.