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The rise of Loom, Notion, Roam, and iterative design
How disruptive young companies use iterative design to expand market share.
New market entrants are rarely ever “New”. In most cases, they have been around for years, iterating internally and focusing on filling a small niche within an industry. These new entrants cause a ruckus when they start solving the problem once solved by an incumbent. This essay will cover how companies like Loom, Roam, & more are using iteration to disrupt their industries.
The Iterative Design Lifecycle
If you’ve ever taken any marketing classes, you might be familiar with Porter’s Five Forces framework for analyzing a company’s competitive environment. One of those forces is the threat of new entrants.
Porter focuses on the incumbent side, encouraging marketers to focus on the industry & scope from a place of sustainability, not disruption. This focus on sustainability, and not iteration, is why we always see companies with big market shares get threatened by their smaller, nimbler, more innovative counterparts.
The iterative design lifecycle is essentially the timeline that disruptive young companies use to overtake the incumbent. It’s how Zoom overtook Microsoft’s Skype, & Airtable is competing with…
