clips of logic

Everyone knows that time equals money. The more time you spend on doing something, the more it is going to cost you and vice versa. This means that you can manipulate one of these attributes by changing the other.

The relationship between time and money isn’t always linear. You can for example, spend more time on something to lower its cost. The simplest example would be to hire someone cheaper and have them work on something for a longer period of time compared to hiring an expert to finish it earlier.

This trade-off between speed and cost is something that we all are familiar with. If you are on a budget, you work around that. If you need something fast, you pay more. But things get complicated when you bring quality into the equation.

Unlike time and money, there’s no reliable way to quantify quality. To make matters worse, everyone have their own definition of it. In the food industry, some diners might focus solely on the taste while the others take into account the atmosphere and service of the restaurant.

There are some cases where quality is ignored or at least of less importance. When choosing between which store to rent movies from, most of us would either choose the cheaper one or the nearer one to save time. This happens a lot when you are dealing with commodities.

When trying to differentiate your product from the rest of the market, it is best not to focus on making it cheaper or faster. The reason for this is simple. There is a limit on how fast you can do a haircut and how cheap you can charge for a meal.

Quality on the other hand, as stated before, is something more subjective. There are more ways for you to improve the quality of your products and services. You can appeal to the interest of your customers instead of their wallets and watches.

The best thing about focusing on quality is that when you are good enough, your customers will ignore the speed and cost of your product. Look at the line outside a famous restaurant. People are willing to trade their time for a chance to dine there and most of the time the bill isn’t exactly cheap.

If you are starting a business or looking to revamp your product line, I think it’s a good idea to look at how you can make it more attractive to your customer. Obviously you still need to keep tabs on the cost and time but it will definitely be worth your time to put a little more thoughts into the quality of your products.

Once in a while, you’ll get an idea to create or improve something. If you don’t fear bad ideas, you’ll probably have more. And if you gone through enough ideas, you might stumble upon one that you willing to go all out for.

When you finally found the best idea (at that point in time), you would probably want to seek some validation. For example, when we had the idea for Ravejoint, we did some research and concluded that most food reviews sites out there isn’t good enough. So we went ahead.

The research and validations are obviously prone to confirmation bias but we needed it to give us the confidence to stick with the idea. In other words, we are trying to come with reasons that the idea is a workable one. We had to believe in it and take the leap of faith.

Sometimes things work out but other times it doesn’t. So when it’s apparent the idea isn’t the one that’s going to solve all our problems, we start to look for reasons as to why it failed. This time, we are trying to convince ourselves that the idea isn’t worth pursuing anymore.

It seems rather wasteful to go through the entire process just to find out if an idea works or not. But if you don’t work on an idea, it will forever be just an idea. What a waste.