Delta what? A framework for product success

Kunal Shah is a philosophy major but what made him successful in the tech space when all these IT graduates from IIT and other top reputable institutes have failed? Meet Delta4 - Kunal’s framework for finding successfull product ideas.

What makes things successful?

You take the old way that things were done before and the new workaround that you have come up with, compare them with regards to a score of efficacy on the old and new.

Here Kunal takes the example of traditional cab hiring services and Uber. When asked about what Lenny (Lenny’s podcast) thought about the difference, Lenny gave the traditional cab hiring service a 3 and the new uber a nine.

And Kunal explains that whenever the score is greater than or equal to 4, three things happen

• It is irreversible
• People are more tolerant to failure
• Unique brag-worthy proposition - Whenever humans unlock a delta 4 product or service, they cannot stop talking or sharing about it - AKA Word of Mouth - that is what is happening around OpenAI and LLMs

But we must direct our attention to the fact that making everything tech does not make it efficient

Let’s talk about buying suits online vs offline

Buying suits offline has way better score than buying suits online.

Therefore, when the score is below 4 you see that,

• It is reversible
• People are not bragging about it
• And you have zero tolerance for it

Delta 4 was derived from something about entropy and evolutionary biology - along the lines of when does a species get disrupted(?), what is entropy(?) and why does low entropy require growth of high entropy(?)

People are busy, they have enough things to do, and they have enough products and apps, they are not going to take the time to really dig into something that is not much better

These notes were derived from an episode of Lenny’s podcast. Below is the link,

Kunal Shah on winning in India, second order thinking, the philosophy of startups, and more