Pyramids of non-value

There’s a brutal truth that drives us in whatever we are trying to achieve. Make money. And to do so, someone else has to give us their money. With all the ethical implication, if we assume we are providing something that has a value - and the value is created by the audience most of the time - taking money from customers should not be a problem. If we don’t, others will take that. Each and everyone of us has a “budget” they NEED to spend and in a way as providers of service we should be able to fill the gaps with our product or even create new needs that didn’t exists before.

If we assume a pyramid of needs exists, we can create some variations of the Maslow’s hierarchy:

And fit some products as an intellectual exercise:

I just put some examples. I guess each and every one of us will have different products to place there, but I think this structure can cover 99% of the products we can think of.

Needless to say, the useless stuff is where all the products with no market end up, and if you can’t find any other place for anything you’re offering, you have some thinking to do.

Keep in mind that the pyramid doesn’t account for the intrinsic value of the product but rather for its "promise of value." AG1 is considered crap—or at least pretty useless—by a lot of users. Still, its promise of giving you some kind of super health appeals to the basic needs of health and food.

Wait, now that I think about it more, there’s a small variation to the pyramid that will make more sense.

Cheers (and happy New Year my dear readers!)

F