Don’t Aim For a Big Hit — Build Multiple Niche Products Instead
Or why we believe in confidential computing and its impact
Asimov’s Foundation series (recently made into an epic TV Show) explores a simple idea: what if we could use statistics to predict major historical events, given we have a large enough number of people (datapoints) to fuel that statistics? This looks at one externality of growing world population, but if we look at another angle, it’s possible to say that any, no matter how small relative to the total amount, a niche could have enough people as customers to sustain a business.
As humanity has passed a milestone of eight billion people, it seems appropriate to revisit these ideas.
By no means we suggest humanity should stop investing their time and effort into general big-idea-driven projects, such as space exploration, clean energy, or general artificial intelligence — each of those requires combined resources (for example, to build datacenter capable of running thousands of GPUs that power up a GAI), coordinated work of thousands of experts in multiple disciplines. That still leaves plenty of space (and market) to explore for smaller teams, or even individual entrepreneurs. Big infrastructural platforms can perfectly coexist with a multitude of products each build for a specific task or audience.
What does this future look like? Instead of having behemoths of feature-rich Swiss-army-knife type of apps, we could have a vast number of smaller interconnected and fine-tuned applications each for its own purpose. This also assumes that it’s OK to have multiple apps aimed at one problem, but marketed for different groups of people. Some believers take this to an extreme saying we could use machine learning and generative algorithms to endow an app’s carcass with a completely personalised and unique look and feel for each and every user.
Funny enough, the current state of Web3 offers somewhat an MVP version of this. There are multiple approaches to browsers, wallets, networks, token economies, and less general things, while some features, such as interoperability or operating over a user-owned set of data, are already there.
At first, it might seem a contradiction that we’re building a grand infrastructural solution. The disbelievers saying “it’s a too narrow use case” are right, but here’s the catch: confidential computing is a niche on its own. It is, indeed, a quite specific thing that is most concerned with protecting users’ data where decentralization part makes sure no entity could wrestle the control from them or compromise it in any way. As we can see, a niche could be deep and wide enough to explore and build new exciting product that make people’s lives better.
The importance of understanding and building solutions that enable developers is another recurring theme in our blog (check out the cloud tech deep dive series). So the next logical step would be creating perfect conditions for the product developers to test their hypothesis, access the resources and data required to prove them, all that without burning too much on the infrastructure while doing it. Super Protocol vision is exactly that, instead of focusing on general computing things, we’d rather cover a variety of potential challenges for a specific audience.
Excited to explore the potential of confidential computing? We’ve got a bunch of things to get you started!
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Join our Ambassador Program if communicating ideas and helping others achieve more is your thing!
Still not sure where to start? Let’s chat on Discord — we’d be happy to help.
