Hello! Would like to know your opinion on a model.<p>Every product or service has an impact externality depending on what it can be applied for. A person using the product can decrease or increase well-being of parts of the society. It may happen unintentionally (by design) or on purpose, if the person is aware of the impact they make.<p>Depending on what effect dominates overall, we can roughly define three types of products by the social impact sign.<p>The first type are products with a negative externality. Using a product for its default purpose makes public living worse overall. For example, drugs, WMD.<p>The second, products with a neutral externality. The majority of FMCG can be included: a product itself is "not good" or "bad" but is able benefit good or bad actors regardless<i>.<p>Third, the products with a positive externality. The ones, that increase the common good just by design.<p>As a special case, there are universal positive externality products. Those cannot be used to harm any social group (i.e. very unlikely or useless for such a goal) and increase the public good the more people use them.<p>And there are all kinds of in-betweens on this spectrum.<p>How do you think, are there products with universal positive externality? What are they?<p></i>I operate the terms "good" and "bad". It might be an oversimplification. You can apply your understanding of what is generally good or bad for people.
I run a SaaS in the healthcare space and an unforeseen impact is how digitising paper-based business has a transformative economic and lifestyle improvement for the owners.<p>On a call with an early customer, they were nearly in tears of happiness when they realised they could free up a bedroom full of filing cabinets in their house. They continued to say how it was saving them hours of admin over their weekend to spend more time with their family. I won't pretend this was anything unique to our product offering, just the process change they capitalised on that freed them up to have a better quality of life.<p>I don't think I could have engineered this outcome pre facto, it's a byproduct that emerges with useful tools and process changes.