The Rabbit and the Use Case (a Fable)

Once upon a time in a small village next to a big forest there lived a curious little boy. One day he found a strange object in his grandmother’s attic. It looked like this.

The boy came out to the porch and tried to figure out what the object did. All of a sudden there was a loud noise and something flew out of one of the pipes in the front. Although a little scared, the little boy liked the sensation and spent the next three days trying to figure out how it happened and how he can repeat it. Hurray, on day four he found how to make the sound again! Next day he worked out that he can put a plum core into the pipe and it would fly when the noise happens. The next week was spent in cheerful experimentation – different fruit cores, different directions, different distances, and the like. Making one or two new observations became a daily routine.

One day, the boy noticed that the metal ball he was experimenting with hit a small animal. The animal quickly ran away, limping. “Interesting”, thought the little boy. He hasn’t seen animals like this before. He only noticed that it had big ears, like so

At night the boy had a dream, in which an ancient Egyptian hunter came to him and said “This thing you have, it´s amazing! It works very much like bow and arrows, but can reach a much, much further. If I were you, I´d call it The Gun”.

The boy liked the name and continued his experiments. He also named the noise “shooting”. He was shooting right and left, then to the front and right and left again. It was fun all around. One day he hit the second animal of the kind he’s never seen in their forests before. A neighbour was passing by, looked at the animal and asked if the boy was going to use the meat. Then he gave the boy some money for it. The little boy bought an ice cream with half of the money, and after eating it decided to check if he can hit “rabbits” (as he now called the newly discovered animal) on purpose. He was a structured little boy, so he made a sketch of the animal, spent the other half of the money to modify The Gun and now had two variations, which he used in turns. He was also not shooting in all directions any more – he was looking for the rabbits.

In the meantime, the neighbour gave some of the meat to his friends and they liked it too. People started showing up at the house where the boy lived asking for “rabbit meat” - apparently, all people living nearby liked it, but struggled to get it, since the rabbits were quite rare and quick.

Later, when the little boy was interviewed by the Wired magazine, the interviewer told him that some clever people wearing white robes and carrying glass tubes around called what he was doing “testing a hypothesis”. This "hypothesis" was a fancy way of saying "The Gun could hunt rabbits and that the boy can sell the meat to the locals". It turned out that both of these were a yes.

The little boy's days were getting busier and busier. So, he asked a friend to help him. He explained how to look for rabbits, how to aim and how to collect the meat. The same friend helped him bring the meat to the Sunday market. With the money, they bought many delicious ice creams, made more modifications to The Gun and one day realised they could use even more help.

To cut the long story short, in a few months, the boy was running The Gun Platform Corporation registered in Delaware. This was a serious operation. He had a group constantly improving The Gun and creating different versions of it, which he called “developers”. He worked out a whole system for categorising different types of rabbits, their habits, ways to hunt them, and which modification of The Gun worked best for which kind of rabbits. And there was a big team doing the actual hunting, which he called “the sales team”. It was a conveyor-like operation, working like a clock.

And they all lived happily thereafter.

This concludes the tale of The Rabbit and The Use Case. Bedtime for little boys and girls.

For the rest of us - each fable has a moral. This one does too and here it is – every startup needs a use case and this fable is a story about finding use cases and building sales based on them. Sorry that the moral is not very fable-like.

In short, the way you find use cases is by looking for ideas (hypothesis), testing them, validating them with customers, clearly articulating the use case you validated and making it replicable in a predictable way. And then scaling it while constantly improving.

Someone pointed out to me that I’ve been telling this story for over 20 years by now. Which means that when I started, I didn’t know that it was about something that would later get a name. In 2007 an American entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen called this something 'product-market fit'. He defined it as “finding a good market with a product capable of satisfying that market.” Go back to the Use Cases 101 and check versus the definition of the use case.

Checklist

None. It’s a fable. Have you ever seen a fable that came with a checklist?

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