A Better Experience to Grow a Market

One of more interesting stories to emerge lately is around Uber and how it’s grown the market for taxis and black cars. In San Francisco, the entire spend on taxis and limos was $120 million per year and now people spend much more than that just on Uber in that one city, and the rest of the taxi and limo industry didn’t go away (from Bill Gurley’s excellent post An Alternative Look at Uber’s Potential Market Size). Uber is so easy, efficient, and high quality that they significantly grew the market for black cars and taxis (personally, I’m a big fan of the service).

On the local front, this past weekend we used Instacart to order all our groceries from Whole Foods. Normally, we’d go to Publix, which is much closer than Whole Foods, but doesn’t have as large a selection of organic food. Instacart is growing the market for organic food by making it easy and efficient to have groceries delivered to a larger geographic area compared to what was previously served.

At home, we rarely listened to music until Pandora came out several years ago. A few months ago we put in a Sonos wireless speaker system and now we listen to music 10x more than previously. The Sonos experience took Internet-delivered music services like Pandora and made them substantially better by disconnecting the device (e.g. iPad or laptop) from the delivery of the music (e.g. the sound system). Now, we choose a Pandora station for the Sonos speakers and forget about it. The result is more music with less effort and a better experience.

Historically, business owners have focused more on making their product or service better, faster, and cheaper than their competitors in order to grow their market share, and in turn grow their business. Yes, the market overall was likely growing, but not in a dramatic way. Now, technology is helping deliver a better experience and even traditional slow-growth markets are growing at astounding rates. I’m looking forward to seeing more markets grow due to a better experience.

What else? What would you use more of if you had an experience that was 10x better than before?