Every market disruption I've ever studied comes down to the same move. Someone took one part of the customer experience and made it not a little better, but 10 times better: 10X cheaper, 10X faster, or 10X better. That's the entire formula.
I first heard of this concept from a guy named Barrett Ersek at an Entrepreneurs Organization event back in 2016. Barrett wasn't a Silicon Valley founder. He ran a lawn care company. In his industry, when a customer called for a quote, it took up to three weeks to get one. Why? After getting the call, companies needed to schedule a time to measure the lawn, go out and measure the lawn, come back to the office, calculate the cost, then call the homeowner back to give them their quote. After all that waiting, only 20% of people who requested a quote would become a customer.
He then developed a way to deliver an accurate quote in under 10 minutes, right over the phone. How? By using aerial photos and tax maps, allowing him to quote a lawn without ever setting foot on the property. He called the new company Happy Lawn. Conversions jumped from 20% to 80%. Happy Lawn hit $2 million in revenue in seven months. His old company took five years to reach the same number.
In doing so, he made one broken step 10X faster. That one change disrupted the whole industry.
That idea rewired how I see business. I took it back to my own company, and I credit this as the main reason we were able to grow our revenues in 2020 from $8.65 million to $50.9 million. Then I spent the next seven years collecting examples of other companies that did the exact same thing, most of them without ever knowing there was a formula for it. Eventually I turned all of it into a book, The Disruption Formula.
Here's a slice of what I found. As you read, watch the pattern: not one of these companies invented something new. They each took something everyone had accepted as "just how it works," and made it 10X cheaper, faster, or better.
Cheaper Companies that won by radically lowering the cost to the customer:
Robinhood: stock trades from $10 to $0
Ford (Model T): a car from $2,000 to $260
Vanguard: fund fees from 2.00% to 0.07%
Dell: a PC from $3,000 to under $800
Wise: transfer fees from 5%+ to ~1%
Dollar Shave Club: shaving from $20/month to $3
SpaceX: a launch from $150M to ~$60M
Warby Parker: glasses from $300 to $95
Southwest Airlines: airfare from $300+ to under $150
IKEA: furniture pieces from $150 to $25
SmileDirectClub: orthodontics from $3,000+ to ~$2,050
SolarCity: a solar install from $25,000 to $0 (financed)
Rent the Runway: a $1,000 dress for $100
Casper: a quality mattress from $1,500+ to $995
NetJets: private jet access at 5–10X less than ownership
Redbox: movie rentals from $5 to $1
iTunes: a $15 album to $0.99 a song
TurboTax: tax prep from $300+ to under $100 (or free)
WhatsApp: international messaging to free
Faster Companies that won by radically speeding things up:
Happy Lawn: a lawn quote from 3 weeks to 10 minutes
Lemonade: an insurance claim from 30 days to 3 seconds
Fastenal: procurement from 48 hours to 10 seconds
Flexport: a freight quote from 5 days to 1 minute
CLEAR: airport security from 60 minutes to 5 minutes
Little Caesars: pizza pickup from 25 minutes to zero
Piggly Wiggly: a grocery trip from 1 hour to 10 minutes
Better Companies that won by creating a radically better experience:
Halo Top: ice cream from 1,000 calories a pint to 280
RXBar: protein bars from 20+ ingredients to 4–7
Primal Kitchen: condiments from 12g+ of sugar to 0g
Charity: Water, overhead from ~25% of donations to 0% (100% to the cause)
WeWork: office leases from 60 months to 1 month
Borden: milk shelf life from ~10 days to 6 months
Blockbuster: new releases from 1–2 copies a store to 10+
BigBelly: trash pickups from 14 a week to 3–4
Stripe: payment setup from weeks to minutes
Twilio: telecom integration from months to minutes
Look at that list again. Different industries, different decades, different founders. Same move every time. One part of the experience, made 10X better. That's not a coincidence. It's a formula.
The hard part isn't believing it works. It's figuring out where your own 10X is hiding in your industry: which part of your industry's customer experience is quietly broken, and which lever (cheaper, faster, or better) to pull.
That's exactly what the book walks you through. The Disruption Formula breaks down all of these case studies in detail, plus the step-by-step framework for finding your own 10X: how to map your industry's status quo, turn it into your "Essential Question," and choose the strategy to solve it.
Dive into the case studies and get the framework: order the book here →