Few months ago I bumped into a LinkedIn post by Mohamed Aboulnaga, one of Egypt’s tech visionaries, he was explaining what it means to build a “Phygital” business. I liked the concept so much because it touches on a root difference between two separate worldviews: Building a product that is digital, versus building a product that is physical+digital, i.e phygital.
Full digital means totally online: you don’t have any on-ground operations + all your campaigns, payments, and product development are done on machines.
Phygital is like the best of both worlds. That’s when your product is mostly digital but is utilizing one or more real-life interaction components.
Being aware of the differences between digital & phygital is central to a product vision, because it teaches you what games you’d like to engage in:
- Where your customers hang out, and what channels to use
- What tone & language to choose while delivering your message
- What level of competition to expect
- How big is the room to niche in or out as you go
Not only that, it also closely correlates with another worldview difference: Local vs Global.
What I’ve come to realize is that fully digital products have way less friction to serve a global vision & community, as opposed to phygital. And although Phygital comes with many bottlenecks, it works so well in many regions, like in EG (the original argument of the post’s author).
Derek Sivers, a serial entrepreneur & philanthropist, explains it so well in this now 11-yr old short essay:
If you’re local, you focus on your community, doing things in-person. But this means you have less time to focus on the rest of the world.
It was nice to find an intersection between 2 worldviews: Global Focus & Fully Digital Businesses.
Since I graduated 4 years ago, I always had this dream of building something on-ground. Something that profoundly strengthens sense of community and wellbeing. So late 2019 me & some friends looked into launching something that is a smaller version of https://www.lycheeegypt.com/ – We went several milestones before calling it quits (since then the project has been on my radar, for when I have the needed resources & time).
So back then, I was thinking “Full Physical”. Few years later, my interests changed, along with my vision, and I wanted to embrace a “Phygital” worldview, which involved building software products that are mostly digital but also do have physical components. I thought this was the ideal thing to do for years to come, but then hyperinflation happened, and I went on to think in terms of “Full Digital”. All of these shifts are on a relatively small timeline, and it taught me that factors like socioeconomics could cause huge shifts in the way you approach life & work.
With this new data, I’ve come to realize that while you can either focus on global or local at a time, it’s also important to point out that you can alternate between both on a large-enough timescale. In Sivers post, he gives a quick breakdown of a 9-year span in his life where he alternates his efforts between being useful to his community and being useful to the rest of the world. And I frankly like the approach so much. He also associates the differences between both views with the type of your personality:
Like your tendency to be introverted or extroverted, or conservative or liberal, these fundamental world views shape your approach to life and work.
However, it comes down to how you would like your balance to look like, and more importantly, what’s your vision’s time unit – Is it measured in months, years, or tens of years? Answer to that could be a good starting point for figuring your version of each of the above worldviews.