It's very easy for us to look at others and identify their behaviour as stupid. I've always tried to assess it as all people are domain stupid, just like all people are domain smart. By this I mean that everyone has their area (or domain) of expertise and of ignorance.<p>For example, I'd suspect that the majority reading this cannot change the brakes on their car? Perhaps a similar proportion of mechanics can code C++.<p>Looking at the example in the post - people buying a limited edition $400 Starbucks card for $450: Starbucks is far more than a coffee vendor to those who shop there regularly. When you spend money on things, you become overly attached to those things. As Starbucks overtly sells consumables, there is some dissonance to attachment without a physical manifestation. So with the limited edition gift card, I am able to focus my attachment on a physical object.<p>The additional genius of this move was to make the card $450. They could have also made a $25 card with $20 credit but the high price of both the card and the premium meant that people felt that it was a better representation of their attachment to Starbucks.
Buying a new car and losing 10-30% of the value by driving it off the lot is lunacy to some people.<p>Buying a used car with no warranty is lunacy to others.<p>Stupid is relative.
Amy Hoy's talk at Webstock was along similar lines: <a href="http://vimeo.com/39750688" rel="nofollow">http://vimeo.com/39750688</a> .. inspirational and worth watching (if only because I'm a very minor example in it ;-)).<p>A lot of people find many things stupid until they're exposed to it enough. "Wii" was a stupid name. Microsoft releasing a console was stupid. The iPod was stupid. The idea of powered flight was crazy. Life, industry, and entrepreneurship feeds on stupid and makes it smart.
"No one in this world, so far as I know-and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me-has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." ---H. L. Mencken
Ogilvy's Confessions has a fine line about this, which roughly paraphrased, goes:<p>Those who are most successful in new business are those who show the most sensitive insight into the <i>psychological make-up</i> of the prospective client.<p>(Emphasis mine.)
That's the beauty of the system - if you think somebody has more money than sense, you don't have to resort to violence or coercion. You only have to sell him a card that is worth $400 for $1000 (or some other shiny gadget, like an app saying "I am rich" or just making farting sounds for those who aren't that rich yet), and you both are happy, and both perceive you have more than they came with (even though you both secretly think the other guy was stupid, but who cares?). And you don't even have to do all the work yourself - there's a whole corporation that does all the work for you for mere $50 (less than 10%, how cheap is that?).
"Don’t laugh at anything, there are business opportunities in places you’ve never even knew existed."<p>Absolutely. The best entrepreneurs are the ones who can find opportunity in the most unexpected places.
ironically - this seems to work perfectly well for startups and companies on a less obvious level. Anyone remember the Gmail invites? They were offering email - a service that existed for a decade already (free) at this point - yet people were ready to kill for an invite! I remember a site that opened up around it called GmailSwap - where people were often offering up cold hard cash, in exchange for a Gmail invite. Today's launchrock pages are essentially a gentler version of the same thing "sign up to get exclusive first access to our beta" => "Give us your email so you can be the first to test buggy beta software and tell us how to make it better"
You can extend this to a lot of different areas - schemes like Amway or Tupperware - and if I allow myself some leeway - I'd say even some religions.
Article about the card, and EBay sales on Forbes: <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2012/12/13/starbucks-450-gift-cards-sell-out-in-minutes/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2012/12/13/starbuck...</a>
If you're reading this article on Hacker News, you are a very unusual person. In fact, everyone's very different and very strange, but you in particular are very strange.<p>If you extrapolate your beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes and expect them to apply to the rest of the population, you are making a mistake, and missing opportunities.
<p><pre><code> I’ve been thinking about entrepreneurship a lot lately,
and this really drove home the point that I have no clue
what people want.
</code></pre>
I think this is the most important/practical point from the article. It certainly is for me.