Apple’s Vision Pro is a $30 Trillion Product

In 2014, I calculated that Apple’s equity value would be $3 trillion, which it is today. Apple’s platforms have created even more equity value for its developers, who generated over $1.1 trillion in revenue in 2022. Using the same analysis, method, and theory, that I used in 2014, we can analyze the equity value creation potential of the Vision Pro today. 

In short: the Vision Pro will be one of the most successful products in history measured by revenue, profits, customer satisfaction, and equity value creation for Apple and its developers. The reason why is simple: because it will get more customer jobs done faster, more accurately, and yes, less expensively than any product in history. 

Equity value can be created in only two ways: (i) growth or (ii) financial engineering (i.e. the use of debt, cost cutting, stock trading, or arbitrage). 

All growth that creates equity value results from helping people get jobs done better, in other words, from helping them solve real problems, which are known today as Jobs-to-be-Done or JTBDs. 

As humans, we evolved to survive and reproduce on a planet flying 20 miles per second around a giant nuclear reactor called the Sun. In our physical reality, there are categories of JTBDs: food, shelter, clothing, health, education, transportation, energy, and leisure. All categories of JTBDs require optimization, planning, design, engineering, assessment, analysis, maintenance, revision, and investment. 

And these JTBDs all exist in reality in three dimensions. The Vision Pro will be a success because a 3D platform and interface is a much faster and more accurate way to get these jobs done. It is hard to imagine this, in part, because we have been locked in 2D interfaces for decades. But developers, will create applications that unlock human potential with the Vision Pro because humans and our JTBDs are three dimensional. We evolved and live in a three dimensional physical reality. 

But we also live in a virtual world: television, movies, games, social networks, books, media, art, music, finance, information, and the internet all exist today in digital form as 1s and 0s. These categories of JTBDs exist in the digital (virtual) world and they can be two, three and even multidimensional (for example analyzing business or medical data that includes multiple variables that change over time). 

So what is the size of the market for the Vision Pro? Meta has sold 20 million Quests at about $500 each. Using the traditional definition of a market, this a tiny market for Apple, which has about $400 billion in revenue. But to define a market using by calculating (i) the products sold times (ii) the price of the products is a classic investment mistake because customers are not buying products, they are hiring them to get jobs done at a price they are willing to pay. 

For example, we all switched from records to cassettes to CDs to iPods to streaming apps because the new products got the job of “creating a mood with music” done faster and more accurately. This is true in any consumer, business or medical market throughout history: the customer’s JTBD is stable, but the products and technologies will change. The JTBD is the true market. 

The Vision Pro’s market is extremely large because it includes customers’ willingness to pay to get expensive and time-consuming jobs done better. It will help more people make more money by reducing the total cost of getting jobs done in the physical world today. And it will create new opportunities to make money in the virtual world, creating human-centric virtual 3D spaces that enable us to create, collaborate and hopefully communicate in much better ways than we do today.

The equity value creation potential of the Vision Pro for Apple and its developers is tens of trillions of dollars. 

The future is looking very bright. 

 

 

thrv & Jobs-To-Be-Done

I am proud to announce thrv publicly. thrv is the first and only product management application based on jobs-to-be-done innovation theory. We have been developing thrv over the past two years, but it is really the culmination of my 25 years of working with Fortune 500 companies, private-equity sponsored companies, and start-ups. 

Over two decades, I have repeatedly seen the same growth problem: launching successful products that satisfy customer needs and accelerate revenue growth is exceptionally hard. 

Jobs-to-be-done is the most effective and proven way to satisfy needs and grow. It has been used to successfully launch new software applications, hardware products, and medical devices that have generated billions of dollars in new revenue (with much lower risk). JTBD has an exceptional track record across B2B, B2C and medical markets. 

So why isn't every company using JTBD? Because historically it has been very hard to use. Customer jobs are very complex. Using the customer's job to identify competitor weakness, create a product roadmap, and launch a product is very difficult.

Until thrv, the best JTBD tools were Excel and PowerPoint. This made aligning a team around the customer's job very hard. Using modern software and cloud tools, we built thrv from the ground up to make the customer's job the central focus for your product team. thrv makes using JTBD easier, faster, and more effective. 

The benefits of JTBD are profound because getting a customer's job done better positively impacts every key business metric from top line revenue growth to profitability to return on invested capital.

Using thrv and JTBD, your product team can (I) reduce your risk of product failure, (ii) exploit competitor weaknesses to accelerate your revenue growth, (iii) get to market faster by focusing on the top unmet needs first, (iv) save development costs by avoiding the wrong features, (v) lower your customer acquisition costs with better messaging, and (vi) increase customer retention by increasing your customer satisfaction. 

JTBD almost sounds too good to be true. And I have seen CEOs, executives, and product teams use JTBD poorly in ways that still result in horrific failure. When Excel and PowerPoint are the only JTBD tools, the HiPPO (the “highest paid person’s opinion") wins. And if that person isn't Steve Jobs, even with JTBD, the risk of product failure is still very high.

Jobs-to-be-done is an instrument, like a guitar, and it takes practice to play like Jimi Hendrix.  

This was our goal with thrv: to make a JTBD instrument that is much easier to learn and play. Ultimately your team is like a band, and they each have a role to play. thrv helps them make hit music. And launch very successful products. 

Click here to see a demo of thrv with a complete set of customer needs in a job-to-be-done, a full competitive analysis, and a complete product roadmap designed to win by getting the customer's job done better. 

 

 

Apple's $3 Trillion Valuation

Apple just released impressive quarterly results: $57.8 billion in revenue, 51 million iPhones, 26 million iPads, 4.8 million Macs, and 6 million iPods sold. So how should we value Apple? How much is a share of Apple really worth?

Let’s combine a few things to value Apple: (i) Warren Buffet’s intrinsic value model, (ii) market disruption theory, and (iii) jobs-to-be-done innovation theory. 

To read the headlines, you might think Apple is, again, doomed: “Apple’s Shares Slump on Weak Forecast” and “Apple iPhone Shares, Outlook Come Up Short” are just two examples. These headlines always encourage people to tell Apple what they must do. Here is a great list of past examples of “Apple must do…” (via John Gruber). 

If you look at any valuation number for Apple (for example, a P/E of 12.6, an EBITDA multiple of 8.4) it is remarkably low relative to its competitors (for example, Google has a P/E of 32.2 and an EBITDA multiple of 18.6).

To put this into perspective, if Apple had Google’s P/E,  it would be worth $1.2 trillion (yes, trillion with a “t”) instead of the $452 billion it is worth today. So why is Apple valued with a multiple so much lower than Google?

Continue reading "Apple's $3 Trillion Valuation" »

The Facebook Segmentation Problem

Facebook is about to go public, so obviously the company is getting a lot of attention and focus on its business and long-term prospects. I am not a frequent Facebook user, but I have enormous respect for fellow entrepreneurs and Mark Zuckerberg has done an outstanding job of building a product that people love to use and a very successful company. So congrats on the upcoming IPO. 

The big question, of course, is what is Facebook worth? It is an interesting discussion not only because so many people use Facebook, but because it is going public at an extraordinary valuation. Since Facebook provides a service that is free to users, it has to make money from its customers, advertisers. 

This is the interesting long-term question: can Facebook create more value for its customers (advertisers) than competitive solutions. If it can, it will continue to thrive, if not, it is a serious risk for any investor. Its users might be happy, but its customers won't be. 

Continue reading "The Facebook Segmentation Problem" »

Pivot Away from Pivot

Pivoting is all the rage in startup land. But it is a concept that I believe is extremely harmful to entrepreneurs. Pivoting (and "failing fast") is exactly the wrong approach to launching a new company. 

The problems with "pivoting" don't get enough attention. Venture investors and successful entrepreneurs love to tell the stories of the early days of their startups. 

And this is understandable. I have been there, and the early days are exciting. You start with what seems to be a great idea, you raise venture capital, you start hiring a team willing to take enormous risk to build something new. 

Fred Wilson recently posted about startup creation stories. And there are lots of lessons to be learn from these stories. 

But there are many, many more lessons - and better lessons - to be learned from startup failures. 

Continue reading "Pivot Away from Pivot" »

Market Sizing: Numerical Narratives

Chris Dixon posted about market sizing using narratives as opposed to numbers, and Fred Wilson agreed - even demonstrating market sizing with a cartoon illustration. 

It is easy to see why Chris' and Fred's "narratives over numbers" market sizing might be appealing. After all, as Brad Feld writes, "Almost every market sizing presentation is incorrect - by a lot. Enough to make it irrelevant." Chris writes, "you should never rely on quantitative analysis to estimate market size. Venture-style startups are bets on broad, secular trends."

This seems to make sense: tell a story because your numbers are going to be wrong anyway. But let's analyze the traditional market definitions to see why traditional quantitative methods are incorrect. Non-quantitative analysis (a story) is not enough. Market sizing has to be quantitative because it is a tool to make an investment (i.e. a quantitative) decision.

Continue reading "Market Sizing: Numerical Narratives" »

Fail Fast vs. Zero Burn

Mark Suster has a nice post about the "fail fast" method. He rails against fail fast, and rightly so. He writes:

I have met so many young entrepreneurs who tell me, “we don’t need business plans anymore, there a waste!  We’re going to put our product out there and fail fast!”... or they tell me, “we’ll launch a bunch of products and see what works.”  That is the old “throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks” approach.  It’s intellectually lazy and I doubt many great companies are born this way.

I definitely agree with Mark's view. In fact, business plans are extensive and they take time and money to create for one reason: the goal is to never fail by reducing as much risk as possible before investing in development. Of course most of the venture community (and the broader innovation community) thinks this is impossible, but jobs-to-be-done innovation has shown it is possible by using scientific methods to understand markets and customer needs and significantly reduce venture risk. The problem is not with the idea of creating a business plan, it is with the inputs to the plan. The inputs (i.e. the definition of a market and a customer need) have to change, otherwise creating the plan will not result in a higher chance of success.

A better, lower risk model would be a "zero burn" model. In the traditional model capital is invested in overhead and development ("burn") to build and launch a product idea. The fail fast model just tries to accelerate this by launching multiple products with less capital, but the process is fundamentally the same.

Continue reading "Fail Fast vs. Zero Burn" »

Top 12 Mistakes (3,4, 5)

I wanted to continue my analysis of Marty Cagan's Top 12 Product Management Mistakes. I already analyzed the first two mistakes here, and I included an introduction to jobs-to-be-done terms. I think it is helpful to look at the rest of the mistakes and offer ODI-based solutions. 

Mistake 3. Confusing Yourself With Your Customer

Marty identifies the third mistake as thinking "of yourself as more like the target customer than you are." This is a good mistake to avoid, but there are two dimensions to this mistake. The first is the functional job that the customers are trying to get done. Without a detailed understanding of the job, all the process steps in the job, and all of the needs in the job, it is almost impossible to make sure that your solution will meet the customer needs. The second is the consumption chain jobs (install, interface, learn-to-use, maintain, etc.). In this mistake, Marty is really talking about the consumption chain jobs (the "usability" in Marty's terms). 

Confusing yourself with your customer is only part of the reason usability testing fails to uncover flaws in the product. The real reason is because the product does not satisfy the functional job and the needs. Customers don't buy product to interface with them or to learn to use them. They buy products to get a functional job done. So it is no surprise that usability testing, no matter how much of it you do, fails to prevent a flawed product launch.  What is needed is testing of the features against the needs in order to validate that the feature satisfies the functional job's needs. And because needs in the job are metrics, satisfaction levels can be measured accurately. 

Continue reading "Top 12 Mistakes (3,4, 5)" »

Venturesome Consumers: The v1.0 Mistake

I'm reading Amar Bhide's The Venturesome Economy and he mentions Apple's iPod as an example of "the venturesome spirit of U.S. consumers".  He quotes a WSJ article about Apple:

"Steve Jobs can introduce 'clumsy, overpriced, 1.0 versions[s] and trust that the army of several million Apple true believers will rush out and buy. That is the crucial, often overlooked, key to Apple's continuing success."

I could not disagree more. Apple's success is not based on clumsy 1.0 versions at all. This is a simplified explanation of why their products often define new categories, and this type of thinking is why entrepreneurs and venture investors think the "fail fast" strategy will work. Focus on the early adopters and iterate the product until it is ready for the mainstream. 

The problem with this analysis is it does not focus on the job that Apple helps consumers get done. Consumer jobs are complicated and each one has  50-150 different metrics (needs) related to performing the job with speed, efficiency, and predictability. 

So why does Apple succeed? Because it focuses on the job the customer is trying to get done, and it is exceptionally good at identifying underserved jobs and satisfying the metrics (the needs) related to getting the job done. Think about the jobs they addressed with the iPod: storing music, listening to music, finding music, organizing music. The reason iPod v1.0 was successful was not because "true believers" bought it. It was because it got those music related jobs done better. 

I still use my v1.0 iPod as a music storage system for my car. And in 2009 it still works as well as it did when I bought it because Apple helps me get the job done better.

Why Apple Wins: It's the Job

Apple's winning streak over the past decade (OS X, iPod + iTunes, iPhone) is based on helping customers get jobs done better. Of course, their user interfaces are legendary, but customers don't buy products to interface. They buy products to get functional jobs done. 

This iPhone ad is a great example. The focus is on the jobs you can get done.