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@ Anhern Sarsalor
2025-05-22 22:26:23Suppose you have a small mom-and-pop shop selling bananas, your bananas are of the highest quality, you plant the banana trees yourself, you water them daily, take great care of everything, and still select only the top 1% of bananas to sell.
Your customers love it, there's no place where they can get better bananas, but due to the fact that you spend so much time, your bananas have to be more expensive, so despite the higher quality, you don't make as much money as you think you should; surely you can get a little more of the market if you adopt some of the strategies that work for your competitors.
So you look across the street, and what do you know? Their bananas are of significantly worse quality than yours, but they're not just selling bananas, they're selling apples too, so you think to yourself, "what if I sold apples? Maybe my apples won't be the best in the market, but nobody can beat my bananas!"
You start planting apple trees, and after a while you're able go sell slightly better than average apples, but by doing so you neglect your bananas ever so slightly.
Most of your existing customers don't notice, you still have the best bananas in town, they don't notice the slight drop in quality. And now that you're selling apples too you're making more money, and more customers come to you.
But you notice that there's a new store now that's selling oranges, and people are buying them. So surely you need oranges too, so you can make some extra money.
You plant a few orange trees, but find yourself spending so much time tending to the oranges and apples that you can't devote the same time and love to your bananas.
You are making a bit of extra cash from the new customers, business is going well, but you don't have time for anything else anymore. You no free time anymore, you are overworked and your health is getting worse.
But you can't stop now that business is going well, you are making so much more, yeah maybe you don't have the same bananas anymore, but you do have slightly above average apples and oranges that have attracted so many customers.
You suddenly fall ill, you've overworked yourself and you are stuck at a hospital for a while.
When you come back to your store, a few of your customers are back, but not all of them, so you think of more ideas, mandarins, kiwi, watermelons, you can grow it all, but you're gonna hire a bunch of people to help you so you don't fall ill again.
One thing leads to another and you are making more money than ever, but strangely you don't hear your customers praising your bananas anymore.
So you take one of your bananas, peel it, and as you taste it, a wave of disappointment hits you.
Your bananas are now just as bad as everyone else's; you gave in to the tyranny of the marginal customer.
You make a lot of money now, but your flagship product is long gone, you are now just another Fruitseller.