"You can sell anything that's new, as long as 90% of it is old."

This deceivingly simple statement is a powerful guide we use to focus on and understand your "real" customers -- the ones who have a great need and will purchase your product with the shortest possible sales cycle.

The 90/10 Principle is valuable at every stage of the growth of a new, technology-based industry but we feel its greatest application is early in the cycle. The idea is that buyers, business or consumer, buy products that fit into their world-view. Unless a problem is severe, buyers rarely purchase products that require them to adapt to a totally new paradigm. They are willing to adjust their paradigm if the value of change warrants it, but only a little bit.

For an entrepreneurial company, the difficulty is in identifying what, for a particular buying customer, is 90% old. In most cases, the 90% old is not what you might have expected.

Arrogance of vision is a necessary ingredient to beginning a new venture. The conviction that you know who will buy and why they will buy is the first step in creating new products. The problem arises when your "educated hunch" becomes the only basis for decision during the stages beyond the initial introduction of your new business or product. This is classic "inside-out" thinking.

This assumption, as important as it may be to start the development and business ball rolling, is very often flawed. It may be close but it's seldom close enough to bet the business on it. And that's okay. You're an entrepreneur and entrepreneurs are creative and take risks. You can't and shouldn't be concerned with being 100% right at the inception stage. What's critical is to realize that a product idea, no matter how brilliant, will require rethinking and fine tuning based on what the market is willing to accept and, ultimately, pay money for. This is where the 90/10 Principle comes in.

Early buyers purchase products for a variety of reasons -- often not even imagined by the creators of those products. We use the 90/10 Principle to help you develop "outside-in" thinking to better determine who is likely to buy and why. It's about learning to recognize and acknowledge that a prospect inherently applies the 90/10 Principle in the decision process. And it's about learning to communicate to them why your product or service is something they can't live without.

In conjunction with the Cube, the 90/10 Principle helps us see commonalities among individual buyers and begin to project from this data new markets and opportunities. It provides the method to deconstruct the patterns of assumption and then reconstruct patterns based on knowledge that can ultimately form the foundation of a successful business.