Why We Can't Handle Unexplained Success

My team and I built the most successful app of my career.
And it's driving me absolutely insane.

For reasons I don't fully comprehend, my company's app Sporcle Party was at one point the #1 app in Egypt. We beat TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Tinder...you name it. And I have no idea why.

We shot to the top of both the Apple and Google app stores and we’ve been pretty much a fixture in the top spots ever since. We had about 400,000 downloads last month alone. (We are also quite big in Tunisia for what it’s worth). Now before you assume I'm writing this from my yacht that sits in the swimming pool of my much larger yacht, I have to tell you that we barely break even on this app. The economy in Egypt is rough and people's disposable income for digital products isn't amazing.

But hey, hundreds of thousands of people love something we built. Who else can say that?

But what keeps me up at night is that I can't explain it. We didn't target Egypt. We didn't do anything special for that market. We certainly didn't crack some secret code of Egyptian app preferences. It just...happened.

And that makes me a little crazy.

So this week, let's talk about the narrative fallacy, why our brains demand explanations for everything, and how our need to understand success might be keeping us from recognizing it.

The Explanation Addiction

The narrative fallacy, a concept from Nassim Taleb's book "The Black Swan," describes how we like to create neat explanations for messy, unpredictable events, usually while underestimating how much luck was involved. We are wired to see cause-and-effect everywhere, even when randomness may have played the biggest role.

We're basically explanation addicts. Every outcome needs a reason; every success needs a formula. Every failure needs a villain. The idea that some things just happen? That major events might be mostly luck and timing? Our brains tend to flat-out reject that possibility.

But the problem with the narrative fallacy is that it tricks us into thinking we understand the past and, by extension, can predict the future. Once a big event happens, we stitch together a nice story that makes it feel obvious in hindsight. But those stories ignore all the uncertainty, randomness, and blind freakin luck that were just as important. And the danger is that we start believing the world is far more predictable than it really is.

So yeah, my brain keeps trying to craft some narrative about why Sporcle Party took off in Egypt. I dunno, maybe Egypt has an unexpectedly strong trivia culture. Maybe there is something cultural in how people play games we somehow tapped into. Maybe it's something about how people socialize there. Maybe…maybe….maybe.

We've convince ourselves that if we can just identify the magic ingredients, we can recreate the success somewhere else. But (and you may not like this) sometimes there is no satisfying explanation. Sometimes success is a confluence of factors we can't see, control, or replicate. And our desperate need to understand it might be the exact thing keeping us from appreciating it.

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The Replication Trap

Quite possibly the most dangerous part of the narrative fallacy isn't just the wrong explanations we create. It's what we do with those explanations.

Once we've convinced ourselves we know why something worked, we start trying to replicate it everywhere. The company that succeeds in one market immediately tries to copy-paste that approach to every other market. The person who has one productive day tries to turn every detail of that day into a rigid system.

But what I think Egypt is trying to tell me is that the things that make something work in one context might be completely irrelevant in another. Even if I could perfectly understand why Sporcle Party took off there, it might not help me crack Brazil or Germany or anywhere else.

Each success happens in its own unique ecosystem of timing, culture, competition, and pure chance. Trying to extract universal principles from specific wins is like trying to use a recipe for bread to make soup. Some ingredients might overlap, but you're probably just gonna end up with something gross.

Instead of trying to replicate success, try to replicate the conditions that allow success to emerge. Stay curious. Pay attention to unexpected signals. Build things that can succeed in ways you didn't plan for.

And maybe most importantly, when something works and you don't know why, resist the urge to fix it with your theories.

What to Do With Unexplained Success

So, how do you handle wins that make no sense without falling into the narrative trap? Here's what I'm trying to do instead of trying to solve Egypt:

• Appreciate it without needing to understand it. Some things are gifts. You don't need to earn them or explain them. You just need to recognize them and be grateful. Hundreds of thousands of people are having fun with something we built. That's enough right?

• Protect it from your theories. The fastest way to kill unexplained success is to start "optimizing" it based on your guesses about why it worked. I could spend months redesigning Sporcle Party for Egyptian users based on my theories about their preferences. But what if I'm wrong? What if the thing they love is exactly what I'd change?

• Stay alert for similar surprises instead of trying to recreate this one. One lesson from Egypt is that our biggest wins might come from places we never expected. So instead of trying to force another Egypt to happen, I'm watching for other unexpected pockets of enthusiasm. Maybe it's a different country. Maybe it's a different demographic. Maybe it's a completely different product.

The goal isn't to understand every success. Success doesn't always need a story. Sometimes it just needs appreciation, protection, and the wisdom to know when to stop asking why.

In Conclusion

The narrative fallacy wants us to believe that we are in control, that every outcome has a logical explanation we can reverse-engineer and replicate. But the world tends to be messier than that. The best opportunities often come from directions we never thought to look and the biggest wins often make the least sense at first.

We built something that brings joy to a whole lot of people. They found us, not the other way around. And instead of trying to turn that mystery into a formula, maybe I should just focus on making sure those people continue to have a good time.

Frankly, the need to understand everything is overrated. The world is full of opportunities that don't look like what we expected. The key isn't having better theories about why things work. The key is staying alert to good fortune, wherever it decides to land and having good systems in place when it does.

Because maybe the real win here isn't understanding every success, but staying curious enough to recognize the next one when it arrives.

As always, thanks for reading,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)
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P.S. If anyone reading this is curious, Sporcle Party really is a fun app. It's a pub trivia game in your pocket and I am quite proud of what me and my team made. I just wish it made more money.

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