That makes sense — thank you for the clarification.
Another thing that came up for me in reading this is that I’m not sure if I’m convinced of this as the one true theory of demand (this might just be my interpretation after reading you critique the other accounts of demand).
To me, this ‘authentic demand’ might be too high a bar and preclude many (most?) businesses. In the case of Common Cog, or other publications I subscribe to — I can imagine being in the scenario of being very curious about eg the community or the paywalled posts, but being able to just not subscribe? Or if I think of most books that I buy — it feels like mostly I can just not buy them (so most books don’t satisfy authentic demand?).
I am likely misunderstanding authentic demand — it is something deeper and more intuitive than my simple parsing, but still, having read the post (and not the book), I do come away wondering whether we need an integrated theory of demand rather than several different theories that more or less work in different domains. What’s to say that the theory of demand for cosmetics has to be the same theory of demand for a cybersecurity startup?