- If customers can answer questions about their goals far more easily than about sources of meaning, then all these processes—customer surveys, user research, and metrics—will be more sensitive to goal-related demand.
- But let’s say you are a special kind of entrepreneur—you can magically talk to people about their sources of meaning, even when they’re inarticulate about them.
- But it doesn’t stop there. Let’s you’re an even special-er kind of entrepreneur. Not only can you collect sources of meaning from the inarticulate, you can magically design good spaces, using new design methods you invented.
Your design methods may lead you astray. The most dominant design trainings are UX and incentives design. But they’re all about moving people along through funnels, smoothing out their experience, reducing choice, and incentivizing or entertaining them along the way.
Even if you wrote down space-criteria, following these design methods will bring you towards serving funnel demand, not space-demand.
Well, you’ll still have to justify your project to colleagues, funders, employees, and customers. If they’re inarticulate about meaning, you’ll struggle: you’ll struggle to tell employees what meaning-related targets to hit; or to plan around meaning, etc.
You won’t be able to talk to funders—if they mostly understand funnels and tubes success, they’ll wanna fund funnels and tubes.
So it will be hard to scale your space.
That’s so different from if your project was based on tastes: imagine you were raising money or assembling a team to open a bubble-tea shop—you can point at an expanding market for bubble tea, talk to bubble tea-lovers about their preferences, etc. Right now, you can't do that with meaning.