Obstacles Beyond Overcoming, Into Opportunity

1
This is from KakaoTalk's early days. Around 2010? 2011, perhaps. At that time KakaoTalk was a simple IM service? — the leading IM service — and during the process of adding a new service, there was an incident where operation was suspended.
The new service was Gifticon Shop. The issue was that the Gifticon Shop system had already established itself in the desktop application and web market. The question, as I recall, was whether to recognize the patent of the first-generation? company that had led the desktop and web market over to mobile, treating the mobile app and the web as separate markets, or to view them separately.

In the past, iRiver, which had grown its company starting from mass-producing and distributing knockoff? no-name CDPs in China, dominated the MP3 player market, and music files were distributed almost like public goods through services like Soribada.
There is a similar case with Apple, which, just before the iPhone release, was running the iPod — the only MP3 player synced with iTunes, with a large monochrome black-and-white display.
In a music market where free was the norm, by providing a groundbreaking interface for music management, Apple gave consumers a UX (a new experience and convenience worth bragging about) that went beyond the price of music. As they executed the strategy of converging the two markets into one, they had a patent dispute over interface issues with a company called Sound Blaster.

Later, both Apple and Kakao came to lead their markets.
Fortunately, they were lucky. The luck here is not that they overcame an obstacle, but that the obstacles — which could become very important opportunities in the market — were encountered while the core team members were still young and full of passion in the early days of the business.
And the unique weapon they had was not merely the fact that they solved the problem. Rather than focusing simply on overcoming the obstacles they faced, they used the know-how they had developed in overcoming those obstacles as an opportunity, turning it into an important resource (such as patents) — building solutions that could obstruct their competitors and pre-empting them.



2
While planning a new service? Or while making it concrete, if you clearly delineate each part and their R&R or systematize them, you can be thrown into a situation where you may not even gain a new opportunity of your own to begin with.

The user journey and funnel should not start from the moment of inflow into your service's what; rather, they should start from the moment the user recognizes a need. There is a need to look at your service objectively, as one of many what's that solve a need.
And the end of the journey (funnel) is not the closing of the app or the payment, but should be traceable down to the delivery of the service (product) — shipping/tracking, cancellation/exchange/refund, reuse/posting reviews/virality.
And what must not be forgotten in this process — by a concept similar to the one mentioned earlier, where treating an obstacle not as something to overcome but as a new opportunity was used as a key element in deriving a positive outcome — is that we must not stop at adjusting market fit through the journey (funnel) and grasping the indicators for improving the product and its experience.
The point we should actually aim for is precisely that the journey (funnel) must be configurable not as a linear shape but as a wheel (circle).



3
The reason this came to mind and I am noting it down is that, more than 1 and 2 above, point 3 — that the attitude of treating obstacles not as things to overcome but as opportunities — should not be limited to interface or operational strategy formulation. It must become an attitude embedded in our daily work.

... and these thoughts kept flashing by, so to settle them down a bit, I recalled them once more and left a few words.