The Car Shopping Trap
Seibel: A popular idea — build a car shopping website. They all suck. You want this Tesla-like experience of just buying a car. A lot of founders come back to this problem over and over.
They always think the customer is the person buying a car. But if your customer loves you, they come back 7 years from now. That's hard. The car buying websites are actually built for the person selling cars — that person has a problem every day. Every day the dealership has to hit their numbers.
If your customer loves you, they come back 7 years from now. That's hard. The real customer sells every day.
Frequency: Front Screen or Third Page?
Seibel: Products you use daily tend to be on the front screen of your phone. You use them without thinking. They become almost extensions of you.
Apps on the third page in some folder — those are the ones you don't use often. Hopefully they don't need you to use them often, or else they're probably not very good businesses.
Front screen of your phone = frequent. Third page in a folder = probably not a good business.
Frequency + Intensity: The Uber Example
Seibel: If you have an infrequent and low-intensity problem, you're going to have trouble getting customers interested. You want higher intensity, higher frequency.
Think about Uber. When you need to go somewhere, it's intense — work, the doctor, pick up your kids. So intense you might have bought a $20,000 car to solve it. And frequency — how often do you move more than a mile? Every day. High intensity, high frequency. Before Uber, the taxi market looked small. But look at the customer — there's probably a good business here.
The taxi market looked small. But high intensity + high frequency = there's probably a good business here.