How I Start $1 Billion Companies from Boring Products

TL;DR

Eric Ryan, co-founder of Method, Ollie, and Welly, shares his playbook for reinventing consumer brands: find a large, saturated category with a “sea of sameness”, identify a cultural shift the category has missed, steal ideas from unrelated industries, and simplify to a single iteration.

Key insights

• The playbook: find a big existing category (so no consumer education needed), look for “sea of sameness”, identify a cultural shift happening elsewhere that hasn’t reached the category, then steal fro
• If a category takes itself too seriously or is unnecessarily complicated, the incumbent brands are likely hiding an insecurity – that’s a signal of opportunity.
• The most powerful ideas live at the intersection of familiar and novel; too familiar lacks differentiation, too novel is hard for consumers to try.