I love this email from El Zuck from 2015 because it's so clearly from a guy who puts the cart before the horse. Instead of explaining why people would want to move into VR / AR, he opens with:
Our vision is that VR / AR will be the next major computing platform after mobile in about 10 years. [...] It’s more natural than mobile since it uses our normal human visual and gestural systems. It can even be more economical because [...] physical objects [...] can just become apps in a digital store.
He's clearly salivating at the idea of owning a marketplace that makes 30% off app sales. Just like the main competitors he identifies, Apple and Google. But throughout the email, he doesn't articulate the value proposition for his actual customers!
Like the tech nerd he is, Meta-Mark immediately dives into the technical challenges that his company will face to bring his vision to life. But none of that matters when you can't articulate your vision beyond "we would like more money plz."
The awful book "Start With Why" (awful because the ideas in its ~200 pages can be summarized with the title) is useful here. Apple did not call themselves a "computer company" in the 1980s; they had a much loftier value proposition instead:
With everything we do, we aim to challenge the status quo. We aim to think differently. Our products are user-friendly, beautifully designed, and easy to use. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?
If Apple had stuck with what they were good at, making computers for nerds, it never would have invented the iPhone, the incredibly lucrative App Store, or fundamentally weird tech like a computer for your wrist. But all of these ideas make sense in a framework of challenging the status quo and aiming to "Think different."
It's really interesting to read Zuck's email eight years after the fact because it explains why Facebook hasn't been able to reinvent itself as a Metaverse company yet. Who are you building this for and why should we care?