Invisible Asymptotes

Eugene Wei’s deceptively quiet essay about the most expensive question in business: why doesn’t every person in the world use your product? Most companies ask the inverse — who does convert and why? Wei argues that’s the wrong question, and that companies who only study their existing funnel walk straight into ceilings they cannot see.

The Amazon story

The shipping fees discovery is the canonical example, and it’s worth knowing in full because it’s the cleanest version of the move. Amazon ran two surveys: one to existing customers asking why they didn’t buy more often, and another to non-customers asking why they didn’t buy at all. Both converged on the same answer: shipping costs. That single insight became Amazon Prime, which became one of the most consequential product decisions in modern e-commerce. The lesson isn’t about shipping. It’s about asking the right question of the right people — the people who say no.

The argument

PMF with early adopters often doesn’t transfer to mainstream. Wei warns that product/market fit can exist only inside the early adopter cohort. The product never goes mainstream because mainstream users have fundamentally different needs. The fix is segmentation — different products for different users. This connects to crossing-the-chasm-concept: the chasm exists precisely because early-adopter PMF doesn’t carry over.

Founders are the worst judges of mainstream appeal. The people building the product are usually early adopters themselves. Their intuition keeps pointing at the wrong North Star. The company hits the asymptote repeatedly without understanding why, because the founder’s enthusiasm obscures the problem. The smartest move is to talk to people who chose not to use your product and take them seriously.

Personal asymptotes apply too. The most successful people Wei knows discovered their personal ceilings early and redirected. One realized in grade school she’d never be a world-class tennis player. Another knew within a year he wouldn’t be the best programmer and switched to management, eventually becoming CEO. Ruthlessly flushing out your limitations lets you find the dimensions on which you’re unbounded.

Customer empathy has no asymptote. Wei channels Ben Thompson’s argument here: catalog size has a ceiling, shipping costs have a ceiling, understanding the customer has no ceiling. Amazon’s mission to be the world’s most customer-centric company is inherently infinite-horizon. Almost every other strategic asset in retail eventually saturates. Customer obsession compounds forever.

The ChatGPT counterexample

ChatGPT is the rare case of an invisible floor — a market that turned out to be vastly larger than anyone, including the company that built the product, had estimated. Sam Altman has a tweet that reads almost like a direct response to Wei: “I am still amazed how most startup investors are great at understanding that startups can grow exponentially but don’t understand that markets can too.” The asymptote framework still applies — ChatGPT will hit a ceiling eventually — but the lesson is that the ceiling is much higher when the product creates a category that didn’t previously exist.

Loose threads

• The invisible asymptote framework pairs well with growth-as-compass: growth rate tells you you’re hitting a ceiling, but Wei’s framework tells you why.
• For startups creating entirely new categories, the asymptote is harder to diagnose because there’s no prior market data. The “why doesn’t everyone use this?” question becomes more critical, not less.
• Wei’s personal asymptote idea rhymes with the idea-maze-concept: knowing which paths are dead ends — for your company or yourself — is the meta-skill.