I went on the Ben and Jerry’s factory tour yesterday. My favorite story was how they came to make the chunkiest ice cream. It isn’t how you might expect. There were no customer interviews, surveys, or focus groups full of data to support a radical decision.
Ben just couldn’t taste. He had no taste in the sense that flavors alone didn’t make ice cream delicious for him. He needed extra chunks to make the it interesting and worth eating!
A key feature of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream started out as a constraint imposed by one of the cofounders. If you’re a small company trying to copy everything a big organization does, you’re thinking about it wrong. The beauty is in your constraints. Embrace them and create something for people like you.
You might be surprised there are millions of them.