The Theory of Stuff

Posted on 1st February 2010 by Gary
Once again, this is not the post I set out to write. The one I set out to write was called “In Search of Location’s Sweet Spot” and it’s sitting in draft and not yet posted. That’s because before I can submit that post I need to write this one as a warm up act.

Just like Anne Elk (Miss), I have a theory. I call it my Theory of Stuff. I’m sure that other people, far more learned and erudite than I, have articulated such a theory but I’ve yet to come across any evidence for this and for now at least, it remains mine and it contains three buckets, looking something like this:

On the far left hand side we have the stuff bucket. Whilst stuff may sound vague, it’s entirely intentional. Stuff is defined as a collection or set of items, things or matter. Though I was focussing primarily on location data and location based mobile services, this applies equally well to other businesses and markets. It could be stock, inventory, left handed widgets or a plethora of other things.
On the far right hand side we have people bucket. The exact number of people doesn’t matter, for small businesses the number will probably be small and for large businesses the number will be, err, larger. These people are your customers, your audience. Hopefully they have money as well.
And then in the middle we have the secret sauce bucket. Again, it doesn’t matter what this is but it’s very important to look at what the secret sauce actually does.
  • The secret sauce is a bidirectional pipe that connects stuff to people.
  • It allows you to expose your business’s stuff to the people who are your customers, hopefully adding value along the way.
  • It also allows you to extract money from the people in exchange for access to your business’s stuff. In the Internet industry we call this monetizing your audience.
In order for your business to succeed, you need to have all three of these buckets in place. Have people and secret sauce but no stuff? Fail. Have stuff and secret sauce but no people? Fail. You get the idea.
Take a look at every business that is succeeding, especially those that are online and where the stuff bucket contains data, and you’ll see that they have all three buckets in place. Take a look at those businesses which have failed or are failing, especially those that are online, and you either see one bucket missing or there’s just not enough of it.
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary

Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.

Mail | Web | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google+ | More Posts (271)

Other bloggage that may or may not be geo-related to this one:

  1. Retiring The Theory of Stuff; But First, A Corollary

    It’s time to put the Theory of Stuff out to pasture. It’s had a good life. It’s appeared in 5 of my talk decks (or so Spotlight tells me), in...

  2. Location is a Key Context, But Most People Don’t Know This

    Like a lot of people, I get most of the information I use, both personally and professionally, from the web; from RSS feeds, from keyword search alerts and from Twitter....

  3. Contextual Location (and Echoecho Redux)

    I recently wrote about echoecho, an SMS based location sharing service and rather dismissed it as another PlayTxt or DodgeBall, both of which are now shuttered, and argued that EchoEcho...

  4. Conspiracy Theory … Or Not?

    Last week I suffered a major hardware failure. We’re talking catastrophic failure here; a drive which does nothing but emit plaintive clicking noises and which won’t even show up in...

This entry was posted in Journal and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

5 Responses to The Theory of Stuff

  1. Richard O says:
    February 1, 2010 at 12:40 PM

    Gary

    http://bit.ly/ctx8hs
    Have a look at this and it might help help create an even more successful business!

    Richard

  2. Ben says:
    February 1, 2010 at 12:44 PM

    “The secret sauce is a bidirectional pipe that connects stuff to people.” and “In order for your business to succeed, you need to have all three of these buckets in place.”

    I would go further to say that if this pipe isn’t free and flowing, then it’s another symptom of a business that isn’t doing well, or won’t do well.

  3. Onno ter Wisscha says:
    February 1, 2010 at 12:51 PM

    @Richard O,
    the 80-20 rule is just a subset of what what Gary is referring to.
    He’s not just referring to whether your product/service fits a market with the stuff it handles.
    But also: Are you handling the right stuff?
    (probably more important: do you handle stuff the right way?)
    Do enough people have access to your secret sauce?

    Nice post.
    Stirs my thoughts.
    I like that.

  4. Pingback: uberVU - social comments

  5. Pingback: Is location a context or and endgame… « Echoecho blog