By Rebecca Waber
Recently, I took a vacation to Europe with my little brother, a trip I was determined to keep inexpensive despite the weak dollar. This goal turned out to be particularly difficult in Stockholm, where a McDonald’s value meal will set you back $11. Because of the prices, I took a local friend’s suggestion and booked a private room in a youth hostel. Never having stayed in a hostel before, I was unsure about what this cheap alternative would be like.
Actually, it turned out to be a great experience. It was a comfortable, perfectly “good-enough” place to sleep. I began to reflect upon what one gets from staying in a hotel.
It occurred to me that I was perfectly happy without a maid’s “turn-down service” and a private bathroom, and that for a vacation like this, a traditional hotel overshot my needs. What’s more, I discovered that I valued the benefits along new dimensions of having access to a kitchen and being in a casual, friendly atmosphere.
I think the important lesson here is that until I became aware of and experienced a hostel as a potential “European trip lodging solution,” I didn’t realize that I was overshot by hotels, and I didn’t realize that I valued the new ancillary benefits offered by hostels.
I felt surprised and delighted to find a solution that was a better fit than I even knew existed, but I couldn’t have articulated this solution, or even the need for a new solution, beforehand. This is part of why it’s largely impossible to calculate the size of a market that doesn’t yet exist — it’s hard for an individual person to know, a priori, their precise requirements and desires when it comes to different aspects of performance.
And yet after finding that a particular solution is a perfect fit, a person can retrospectively see where in the market spectrum they fall. This is why the task of uncovering the fundamental jobs-to-be-done in a given market context tends to require sophistication and multiple research approaches.
Ultimately, my hostel experience makes me wonder what other, potentially disruptive solutions out there might be a better fit for me than the one I’m using, that I just haven’t experienced yet! Companies that are able to intuit what consumers value, but are unable to articulate, hold the keys to innovation success.