“
according to Donald Brown, a professor at the University of California, there is actually a common denominator to all human civilisations – a certain set of ‘attributes’ – which makes us fundamentally human. Brown has termed these the ‘human universals’.4 Let’s use this as a starting point. According to Brown, the human universals ‘comprise those features of culture, society, language, behaviour and psyche for which there are no exception. For those elements, patterns, traits, and institutions that are common to all human cultures worldwide.’ There are 67 universals in the list that are unique to humans: age grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organisation, cooking, cooperative labour, cosmology (study of the universe), courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination (predicting the future), division of labour, dream interpretation, education, eschatology (what happens at the end of the world), ethics, ethno-botany (the relationship between humans and plants), etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift giving, government, greetings, hailing taxis,* hairstyles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature (the system of categorising relatives), language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, pregnancy usages (childbirth rituals), penal sanctions (punishment of crimes), personal names, population policy, postnatal care, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool making, trade, visiting, weather control, weaving. My point here is that if your idea resonates with a human universal, you will maximise the universal appeal of your app. Solving a ‘universal’ problem creates a much bigger market opportunity than solving a geographically specific, language-related or generally niche issue not shared by a huge number of people. On the flipside, not every human universal maps to a billion-dollar idea. But the list of universals does provide a great checklist, so it’s worth checking to see if you can match apps that correspond to each one. When I was doing this exercise, I came across a fascinating example. I discovered a free app that, despite having more than 129 million downloads5 and massive daily usage numbers, has garnered very little media attention. It is called YouVersion.6 It’s a free Bible app that offers 600 translations of the Bible in 400 languages. It’s a billion-dollar opportunity that maps directly to the ‘religious ritual’ universal. It doesn’t earn much revenue today, but that just may be a matter of time.
”
”