Newtonâs first law states that a body will remain at rest (or keep moving at its constant speed) unless acted upon by an outside force.
Said another way: Things like to keep doing what they're doing unless something else makes them change.
Inertia.
As Iâve moved from physics to the world of solving people problems, Iâve realized this law still very much applies.
People hate to change unless some force moves them to.
That force can be joy or convenience. Connection or fear. At our core, we are a species driven by our emotions, far from acting perfectly rationally.
I love it. Itâs why I fell in love with building consumer businesses. What a puzzle - people act in a certain way and theyâll continue to act that way unless you build them something that compels them to act otherwise.
I got a taste of that with Poppy - thatâs what product-market fit is. That moment when you figured some number of things out, such that youâve exerted a force successfully to move people to sustained action.
So I know exactly how hard it is to move people off of their status quo and exactly how powerful it can be when you do (especially in something as hard and tricky as childcare).
But it turns out that childcare is a broken marketâŚ. the raveworthy product we had built, that moved people to change wasnât scaleable. As much as I hated this fact, I had a choice: I could keep talking about what should be. Or I could take what was, and solve for that.
And so I turned to a problem where I thought software could create delight-filled, affordable solution at scale: the overwhelm of the behind the scenes logistics for families.
But if childcare is a hard problem to solve operationally, the invisible load is mind-bogglingly hard to âseeâ and untangle product-ly.
Believing as I do that it is hard to get people to change behavior, you canât build a thing and tell them to use it. You need to painstakingly map existing behavior and meet them where they already are.
Take school emails: people will ask why I donât build software for schools to send out more sane communication. I could. Others are. But Iâd rather assume that at least for the next while, humans are going to human. And schools and sports teams and other parents are going to keep sending communication at the speed of thought - papers and text messages and emails galore. Inertia again - defaulting to the easiest thing will always win over a theoretically âbetterâ thing.
In the matter of the invisible load, this has been a 4+ year of mapping and measuring and making. But the principles of inertia dictate that thatâs whatâs necessary - to understand what is and solve for that vs. building something people âshouldâ use and expecting them to. Build people a forcefield that filters the noise. That accommodates the millions of ways we are pinged in a day and turn that into some sort of sanity.
So if you want to know why I build the way I build it really comes down to this:
People hate to change.
So donât make them.