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Remember the Flip video recorder? In 2009, it was a sensationa dead-simple, pocket-size recorder that let ordinary people capture and share moments without lugging around a camcorder or figuring out complicated settings. Cisco acquired Flip’s maker, Pure Digital Technologies, for $590 million in stock. Two years later, Cisco shut Flip down entirely. The Flip wasn’t a failure. It solved a real problem elegantly. But it was what I call a “gateway product”an innovation that reveals what customers want but that gets supplanted by something that delivers the same outcome more simply, cheaply, or conveniently. In this case, the rise of smartphones made a dedicated device obsolete. The history of innovation suggests that most game changers proceed through a series of gateways. We had fax machines before email, PalmPilots before BlackBerrys before iPhones, TiVo before streaming, MapQuest and GPS units before Google Maps. Each one mattered. Each one made money. And each one was eventually swept aside. The strategic challenge is to figure out what the shelf life of your gateway offering is. Gateways solve real jobswith inherited constraints Gateway products genuinely solve customer problems. That’s what makes them successful, and that’s what makes them dangerous. Their success validates the desire of customers to achieve given outcomes while obscuring the fact that the method of doing so may be temporary. The fax machine eliminated the delay of postal mail. But it still required paper, a dedicated phone line, and a compatible machine on the receiving end. It imported friction from the old system even as it improved upon it. Email didn’t just do the fax’s job fasterit eliminated the infrastructure entirely. When your product requires customers to maintain scaffolding from a previous era, you’re building on borrowed time. The dedicated device trap One of the clearest gateway signals is a stand-alone device built for a job that could eventually migrate to a general-purpose platform. GPS units, point-and-shoot cameras, MP3 players, handheld translators, portable DVD playersall were gateways. The job each one performed was real and enduring. The form factor was not. This doesn’t mean dedicated devices always lose. Sometimes they win on performance or experienceprofessional cameras, high-end gaming consoles, studio monitors. But the burden of proof is on the dedicated device to justify its separate existence. If a product’s primary advantage is that nothing else can do the job yet, leadership needs to plan for “yet” becoming “now.” When your moat is mastery, you’re vulnerable Gateway products often develop loyal followings among people who’ve invested time in learning them. PalmPilot users mastered Graffiti. BlackBerry devotees became virtuosos of the physical keyboard. TiVo owners learned the interface and programming logic. The learning curve feels like a moatcustomers have sunk costs, and they’re reluctant to switch. But mastery-based loyalty evaporates the moment a competitor makes it unnecessary. Smartphones didn’t require users to learn a new input language; they just worked. Streaming didn’t demand programming skills; it just played. If your customer retention depends on what people have learned rather than what they love, you’re more vulnerable than your churn numbers suggest. 5 questions to ask about your product What frictions or complexities does our product require that customers would prefer to eliminate entirely? Every negative is an opening for a competitor who does away with it. Are we competing on getting to an outcome or on the current method of doing it? If your differentiation is about how rather than what, you’re racing against obsolescence. If someone started fresh today with current technology, would they build this the same way? This is the greenfield test. If the answer is noif they’d build something that makes your product unnecessaryyou have a gateway. What temporary technological gap are we exploiting? Flip cameras existed because smartphone cameras weren’t good enough yet. GPS units existed because phones lacked sensors and software. Identify your gap, and monitor it relentlessly. What’s our plan for when the gap closes? This is the question most leaders avoid. Acknowledging that your hit product has an expiration date feels like disloyalty. But the alternative is being caught flat-footed. The right strategic stance None of this means gateway products are bad businesses. Nokia and Blackberry built hugely profitable business empires on technology that would eventually be supplanted. The strategic error is being lured into believing that it will be a permanent franchise. That can lead, in turn, to overinvesting in extending the product’s life, building organizations optimized for a form factor that’s becoming obsolete, and missing the chance to be the company that makes its own product unnecessary. Apple famously undermined its own hugely profitable iPod to launch the modern smartphone revolution, leading to enormous value creation. The smart play is to harvest margins while they last, watch for substitution signals, avoid the trap of defending your method, and position your firm to ride the next wave rather than getting swamped by it. Gateway products can be supremely valuable. They are like paying tuition to learn about the future.
Category:
E-Commerce
Being a night owl can be bad for your heart.That may sound surprising but a large study found people who are more active late at night when most of the population is winding down or already asleep have poorer overall heart health than the average person.“It is not like, that, night owls are doomed,” said research fellow Sina Kianersi of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who led the study. “The challenge is the mismatch between your internal clock and typical daily schedules” that makes it harder to follow heart-healthy behaviors.And that’s fixable, added Kianersi, who describes himself as “sort of a night owl” who feels a boost in “my analytical thinking” after about 7 or 8 at night.Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. The American Heart Association has a list of eight key factors that everyone should heed for better heart health: being more physically active; avoiding tobacco; getting enough sleep and a healthy diet; and controlling blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar and weight.Where does being a night owl come in? That has to do with the body’s circadian rhythm, our master biological clock. It follows a roughly 24-hour schedule that regulates not just when we become sleepy and when we’re more awake but also keeps organ systems in sync, influencing things like heart rate, blood pressure, stress hormones and metabolism.Everybody’s circadian rhythm is a little different. Prior research had suggested night owls might have more health problems, as well as risk factors like higher rates of smoking and less physical activity, than people with more typical bedtimes, Kianersi said.To learn more, Kianersi’s team tracked more than 300,000 middle-age and older adults in the UK Biobank, a huge health database that includes information about people’s sleep-wake preferences. About 8% of those people classified themselves as night owls, more active physically and mentally in the late afternoon or evening and up past most people’s bedtime. About a quarter were early-birds, most productive in the daylight hours and likewise early to bed. The rest were average, somewhere in the middle.Over 14 years, the night owls had a 16% higher risk of a first heart attack or stroke compared to the average population, the researchers found.The night owls, especially women, also had overall worse cardiovascular health based on meeting the heart association’s eight key factors, the researchers reported Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association.Unhealthy behaviors smoking, insufficient sleep and poor diet appear to be the main reasons.“It comes down to the problem of a night owl trying to live in a morning person’s world. They’re getting up early for work because that’s when their job starts but it may not align with their internal rhythm,” said Kristen Knutson of Northwestern University, who led recent heart association guidance on circadian rhythms but wasn’t involved in the new study.That affects more than sleep. For example, metabolism fluctuates throughout the day as the body produces insulin to turn food into energy. That means it might be harder for a night owl to handle a high-calorie breakfast eaten very early in the day, during what normally would still be their biological night, Knutson said. And if they’re out late at night, it can be harder to find healthy food choices.As for sleep, even if you can’t meet the ideal of at least seven hours, sticking to a regular bedtime and wake time also may help, she and Kianersi said.The study couldn’t examine what night owls do when the rest of the world is asleep. But Kianersi said one of the best steps to protect heart health for night owls and anyone is to quit smoking.“Focus on the basics, not perfection,” he said, again, advice that’s good for everyone. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Lauran Neergaard, AP Medical Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
When Mikala Mahoney was laid off from her marketing job last summer, first she was shocked. Then the anxiety flooded in. I realized that over the past few years in my career I had created a false sense of steadiness, she tells Fast Company. Friends had regularly told Mahoney she was fortunate to have landed a good, stable job as a marketing coordinator at Paramount+. In a moment, that illusion was in pieces. Mahoney threw herself into the job hunt, quickly landing her next role. A few months later, she was laid off again. After losing her job twice in less than a year, this time she decided to bet on herself. Following the traditional path as a salaried employee with a steady paycheck, healthcare, and benefits had long been viewed as the safe bet. But with many peoples paychecks from their 9-to-5 barely covering the cost of housing and groceries, layoffs at their highest in the U.S. since 2020, and nearly 26% of unemployed people having been jobless for more than six months, the unemployed-to-self-employed pipeline has never been stronger. Mahoney spent two months unemployed before she made the decision to go all in on her content creation business. She has also been documenting the process for her following on TikTok. Ive always been making content, Mahoney tells Fast Company. Still, she never envisioned herself as a solopreneur, or what that might look like in practice. I think there’s a different sense of hustle that you need to have in your self-employment, that you aren’t necessarily forced to confront when you are working with a consistent paycheck, she says. Mahoney is not alone. The unemployed-to-self-employed pipeline has become its own content niche on TikTok. This sits within a wider trend of solopreneurship in the U.S.: Nearly 36% of traditional workers now have side gigs, according to MBO Partners’s 15th annual State of Independence in America Report. Whether a backup plan in the face of forever layoffs or a first step toward breaking free from the shackles of a boss, the rising number of people wanting to go it solo and run their own company of one reflects a shift in the balance of power from companies to workersespecially as the social contract has broken down. Increasingly, workers are turning their side gigs into full-time gigs, either taking the leap to solopreneurship on their own initiative, or as a result of factors outside their control. Then, there are those who have yet to experience traditional employment in the first place. Recent college graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs and, while the overall unemployment rate edged up to 4.4%, for younger workers ages 16 to 24, unemployment in September 2025 was 10.4%. When 24-year-old Sophia Stern graduated from college in 2024 she spent hours scouring LinkedIn each day, an effort she kept up for roughly six months. I was desperate for anything, she tells Fast Company, noting that all she received in return were rejection emails from AI bots. At the time, she started a side hustle helping local businesses with their social media marketing. I realized, like, oh, this doesn’t need to be a middle ground in between different jobs. This can be a job. If it didnt work out, she would at least gain valuable experience in an industry she was hoping to break into. And it honestly might be better than continuing to search for a job, because the job market is just so terrible right now, she recalls thinking. After launching a website for SoSo Social, offering social media management and community outreach to small businesses around New Jersey, New York, and Philadelphia, Stern landed her first two clients within a month. Less than a year on, her client base has quadrupled. From launching an online business or monetizing a social media account, to selling templates or paid subscriptions, it has never been easier for workers to take their talents back into their own hands and find ways to monetize them. In fact, the MBO Partners report counted 72.9 million independent workers in the U.S., 5.6 million of whom reported earning more than $100,000 annually. Still, being pushed into self-employment before youre ready, versus taking the leap on your own timeline, makes a big difference. That was never what I envisioned for myself, Mahoney admits. My goal has always been to grow my platform, but I always wanted to do it alongside a steady and stable job. Stern, too, wouldnt have considered starting out on her own this early in her career if other options had presented themselves. I really was forced into it, but in the best way possible, she says. Whether a side hustle, stopgap, or entire career pivot, solopreneurship often offers a lifeline in a job market increasingly throttled by hiring slowdowns, increased competition, and economic uncertainty. Not dedicating 40 hours a week to one employer protects workers from the powers that be. But solopreneurship, with its unpredictable income and lack of benefits, is not the panacea for all corporate illsjust ask any self-employed person. Mahoney and Stern are not closing the door on full-time employment. Both are still open to the right role if it comes along. Ive learned the big lesson that nothing is permanent, Mahoney says. This time, however, she has a safety net of her own making to fall back on.
Category:
E-Commerce
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