Lesson 03: Reason for Existing
Why a startup needs a genuine contrarian belief to justify its existence — from New Coke's failure to Warby Parker's founding.
Written for Axiom Pathways.
Using Coca-Cola’s disastrous 1985 reformulation (a scientifically “better-tasting” product that customers rejected within 79 days) and Warby Parker’s founding story as bookends, this piece argues that marketing’s real job is stress-testing whether people care about a product for the founder’s own reasons — and that a startup without a genuine contrarian belief has no real reason to exist. It offers four concrete exercises for founders to find that belief: filling in “everyone in my industry believes ___, we believe it’s wrong,” mining search autocomplete for customer frustration, testing whether competitors could paste your stated mission onto their own site without losing anything, and narrowing toward a single 10x claim.