I love seeing these examples of product development: begin with a very specific niche at the edge (not tackling the mainstream head-on) and "target non-consumption" - that way, you have no competition; and it's not a zero-sum game where you beat someone, but creating value that never existed before. This is possible not because it's good, but because it's cheap (and good enough):
> primarily a low-cost tool ... for local youth sports .... and financial results of local public companies ... “Mostly, we’re doing things that are not being done otherwise,”
Then, once you have some customers - any customers! - you improve it, bit by bit. It doesn't need to be perfect in the first place; it doesn't need to be perfect in the end. It just needs to be good enough to be useful.
> [customer] worked with Narrative Science for months to fine-tune the software
As for the technology itself, we're not told anything of its details, just what it can do. This is a marketing article, not a tech report. It would be interesting to see the models they use for stories, and whether they use grammars for the overall structure. These are very narrow domains, which are the easiest to start with: you could enumerate all the standard cliches, understand when they apply, and tweak the model. That's where the journalist expert domain knowledge of the two founders would come in handy. BTW: "easiest" is only relative - it would still be very difficult (almost impossible), and kudos to these guys for actually doing it - and even better, making an actual business out of it.
It reads like a 50's Asimov story - the future is finally arriving.
But a Pulitzer in 5 years is absurd, either cynical puff or visionary bravado. Theoretically possible, I think, maybe in 50 years - the figure I've long given for strong AI. ;-)
It means target people with needs that aren't being met. Those people are not consuming (i.e. buying and using) a product or service to address their problem.
It's clearest to see when a product exists to solve a problem, but it's too expensive for some people (or some situation). In the article, the problem of reporting on local sports/financials has a solution (reporters), but the value of that news isn't worth their time: their time is too expensive. So the newspaper doesn't "consume" a solution to the problem of reporting that particular news.
By targeting this non-consumption, the startup doesn't compete against reporters (yet...), so it provokes no desperate fight for survival.
It's an term from Clayton Christensen, who wrote The Innovator's Dilemma, though he doesn't use it til "The Innovator's Solution", and expands on it in "Seeing What's Next".
> primarily a low-cost tool ... for local youth sports .... and financial results of local public companies ... “Mostly, we’re doing things that are not being done otherwise,”
Then, once you have some customers - any customers! - you improve it, bit by bit. It doesn't need to be perfect in the first place; it doesn't need to be perfect in the end. It just needs to be good enough to be useful.
> [customer] worked with Narrative Science for months to fine-tune the software
As for the technology itself, we're not told anything of its details, just what it can do. This is a marketing article, not a tech report. It would be interesting to see the models they use for stories, and whether they use grammars for the overall structure. These are very narrow domains, which are the easiest to start with: you could enumerate all the standard cliches, understand when they apply, and tweak the model. That's where the journalist expert domain knowledge of the two founders would come in handy. BTW: "easiest" is only relative - it would still be very difficult (almost impossible), and kudos to these guys for actually doing it - and even better, making an actual business out of it.
It reads like a 50's Asimov story - the future is finally arriving.
But a Pulitzer in 5 years is absurd, either cynical puff or visionary bravado. Theoretically possible, I think, maybe in 50 years - the figure I've long given for strong AI. ;-)