Without Their Permission

Without Their Permission is Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s plea to you to start something, as he lays out how anyone can use the internet to shape the future of the 21st century without having to get a yes from somebody else first.

This is the first thing any startup book teaches you, so I’m not gonna go too deep into it, but Alexis really made an interesting point about this. Noah Kagan calls it “Engineer’s Disease.” What it means is that most people starting a business (and engineers are especially prone to this, hence the term) do it in the following order:

Build a product you think people will like. Go out the door, wave it around and ask: “Who wants this?”

And then they get sad when no one wants to buy this awesome thing they’ve spent months building. Here’s what people like Noah and Alexis say you should do instead: Talk to potential customers first, figure out what problems they already have and then build something that helps them solve those problems!

Now here comes the interesting part: the real-world problem you’re solving does not have to be a well-known problem at all.

For example, a father and son duo from Australia invented a way to get honey from their beehives without having to open it and tranquilize the bees. Thanks to their simple system the honey just flows out, literally on tap. Not a pretty common problem – yet it managed to gather over $13 million on IndieGoGo, a crowdfunding platform.

Forget about billion dollar markets or reaching 1 in 7 people on the planet, like Facebook (even they started with just college campuses). Focus on a problem that’s personal, close to you, and is unique to a small group of people, and you’ll do just fine.

In 2007, Greenpeace started a campaign to track a whale via satellite, to bring awareness to Japanese fishers still hunting these creatures and protest against an expedition set out to hunt down 50 whales. To engage their activists, Greenpeace held a poll to name the whale. Among the many majestic name suggestions with deep meanings, such as Aiko, Libertad, Mira, Kaimana and Aurora was also one rather fun submission: Mr. Splashy Pants. When the poll ended up on Reddit somehow, the community ended up voting for the name 20,000 times – and it won by a landslide. You’d think this is stupid, but Mr. Splashy Pants ended up generating so much media coverage, that the Japanese government ended up canceling the humpback hunt. The internet has the power to amplify anything at will, so be careful what you put out. For example Youtuber PewDiePie caused real trouble for John Scarce…