My mind just went back to a book I read about smoking addiction. I don’t smoke but I like to read any book that catches my fancy. The book talked about how tobacco became a billion dollar investment. I don’t know if the author was ridiculing smokers, but the way he depicted it was really funny. he said someone must have stumbled on that leaf then thought about this:

what if this leaf could be dried and wrapped up in a paper and we make people buy it and then light it up? That sounds like some new thing humans would buy into. We should tell them they can hold it in between two fingers and swing it around while talking.

The narration I put up may not be the exact way it was written in that book. The author explained how tobacco became a crutch for people when they felt they were going through a rough patch. A “crutch” is what babies do when tey suck their thumb, they rely on it. Tobacco is an ordinary leaf, dried and rolled up in some paper. But tobacco became a product and a bestseller! the book and indeed a lot of statistics hold the opinion that tobacco kills more people than marijuana and some other abused substances. The cigarette industry still expands in leaps and bounds. A simple principle behind this is what I would call “the Law of crutches and disabilities”.

It is important to understand how your ideas, skills, and products fit into people’s habits. This is not just about making one or two sales, it is about loyalty products. This is about building solutions to needs that would always come up, opportunities from disability. I remember once reading something about FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods). A lot of FCMGs produce items like toilet rolls and sanitary pads which are not reusable. The way these products are designed, they have become an essential part of the household and hygiene.

When you are hit on an idea, understand that there must be a need, almost close to being an addiction. If you want to build a profitable venture then you should ask this question “how primary is this my product or service to the needs of my target customer”. This is also the foundation for the ideology that food and clothing always sell, humans can not go without food always and we have gone past the stone age where anyone could walk naked.

I hope this post has been helpful, I look forward to hearing from you. If you could reach out with questions and comments, it would be helpful for me to know the direction these posts would go.