The Unit of Caring

Anonymous asked: Hi, long time fan, first time caller. Do you genuinely believe the target demographic for Quip (or for that kind of product in general) is people with mental health disabilities or struggling single parents? Because I find that astonishingly hard to buy.

Lots of products that are mostly sold on late-night infomercials and mocked as useless - plastic thingies that help you put on your socks, snuggies, electrical can openers - are in fact totally targeting disabled and elderly people (though they still show young pretty abled people in their ads because of course they do).

 And it’s often useful to market your product ~as a thing upper-middle-class professional types use~ regardless of who you actually think most of your customers will be, because lots of people aspire to the professional class. 

Honestly my guess is that Quip-type companies all come out of an impulse to ‘what if we took a common consumer purchase and had a startup for making it more convenient?’ and the ones that’ll survive are the ones that find a price point that makes them make sense for disabled/time-pressed/overworked people, because there aren’t enough techies who want to optimize their life for that to sustain an industry. And Quip seems to have done unusually decently at finding a price point for a broader market: $25 for the initial product and $5 every three months is not a product designed for a market of only lawyers and programmers.

(Also, I do think a lot of Silicon Valley techies who want to optimize their life are disabled or weirdbrained. ‘eating food is too hard, what if there was bland food-substance?’ and ‘going to the store is too hard, what if everything got delivered?’ and ‘talking to people is too hard, what if you could pay someone else to do it’ all get mocked as the weird ‘remove all texture and normal activity from your life to be a productive but out of touch alien!’ thing but honestly the people I know who want bland food-substance and get overwhelmed in stores and will do literally anything to avoid a phone call? It’s about finding those things really hard and wanting help with them.)

• 27 April 2017
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