Here’s my strategy playbook for any startup to get real and get in market:
Step 1.
Think Big, Go Small and Respond to Evidence.
Step 2.
Make small thing bigger and or better, based on evidence.
Step 3.
Revert to step 2, Rinse and Repeat. (That’s the shampoo bit)
Go!
You may not be in the search business, the hardware game, social media or logistics. Yet, we all compete with Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon or GAFA, as they are becoming known. We compete with them on the new set of expectations that everyone has. People expect to find what they are looking for on page one. People expect hardware that doesn’t need an instruction manual. People expect to be able to find and connect with everyone on your platform and people expect pain free reliable logistics.
There are many levels of competition, and one that we often forget is comparative expectations. The benchmark has been raised. While what our startup offers might be better than the alternative, it’ll also probably be compared against worlds best practice.
It does mean we have to raise our game. But what we should never forget is that perfection is an illusion. It’s still possible to improve our game after we’ve already started.
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Whenever I watch a martial arts movie I love the way everything is exaggerated. We all know that no one can really jump that high, that the bad guys can’t really take that many kicks and punches to the head and the sound effects just might’ve happened in post production. That’s cool, we aren’t really watching the film for the truth, but for entertainment. It makes you wonder how much of the real world is like that. Well, I’m pleased to say that some people in the ‘Karate Industry’, if you can call it that, really get it.
Check this out below from SMA Karate!
Boom – that is the best piece of copyrighting I’ve ever seen on a consumer product. The thing we really secretly want baked into the product design. Macro level awesome right there. Something we can all do if we really believe in what we make and we write it like our 10 year old self would.
Startup Blog Bonus – a very excellent Bruce Lee fight scene from Fist of Fury with wicked sticks sound effects.
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But this product, ‘Lily‘ got to me for free, no advertising was required. What is particularly interesting about this product is the little iterations which make a giant difference. There’s a zillion drones for sale, and we all love the footage they create, but I’ve yet felt compelled enough to buy one, until now. Two things stood out for me:
A mate of mine was raving about it, and I was thankful he introduced me to it. It was a gift of understanding. The price? Yep, that’s much higher too, around $1000 retail, but when a product goes just a little further to solve problems, the margins tend to stretch a lot further. It has already has sales above $35 million in pre-orders and becomes available for shipping mid year.
A mother reminder for startups, if we be just that little bit more to our audience, they might just pay a lot more for the trouble we went to. Something we should all give a try.
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Just write a non-epic blog post everyday. Then with the frequency of non-epic, continuous blogging, eventually an epic one will sneak through without permission. It will just arrive. The reason that it will inevitably arrive, is that the law of large numbers sets in. If we have a high frequency of doing anything, then outliers have a chance of appearing. In this case, the blog post.
But there are some other things that happen too. Because we are no longer obsessing with writing something worthy, then the fear that goes with perfection evaporates. It’s just another post on a another day. And each day when we do a thing again, and again and again, we get better at the that thing (blogging in this case) without even noticing.
In fact, if you want to do an epic anything, then doing that thing as often as possible is probably the best strategy we could employ.
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The caterpillar hidden in a tomato from my garden is great news for me as the gardener. While it’s one less tomato to eat, the presence of this little creature is enhancing the ecosystem I’m trying to build. I’ll put that tomato back into the ground. There’ll be more bugs, and butterflies which will make my soil more fertile. In turn they’ll help pollenate the flowers for next season, and they’ll be more tomatoes and resulting nutrition than their was last season.
While it is true that the bugs and competitors reduce my yield now, they increase it later by helping me create more of what I’m trying to grow. The systems approach takes longer, but usually creates more for all participants. This is why market share is never as important as growth. Market share is a me versus you, reductionist measure – it’s very yesteryear. The thing I’m trying to grow is the system. In a world of increasing abundance I want to participate in creating something which means more for everyone. I have little desire to dominate what is already here.
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The people in this video below have been two of my digital mentors for a long time; Gary Vaynerchuk and Seth Godin. Seth even blurbed my book! Both are in a very similar market space, and I imagine they both share many of the same customers. They are both NYT best selling authors on business in the modern era. Both provide keynote speeches to old industrial centric businesses. Both are proponents of the new era of technology and the incredible opportunity it provides, but in short they are both teachers.
This video interview below has a lot of interesting tension throughout it. While they respect each other, they clearly don’t agree on many things. They both employ different tactics, and have a different approach to essentially achieve a similar outcome. It’s more proof that there isn’t a way, but many ways. And even though their philosophies might differ, both are incredibly authentic in their approach and go about their work in a way which suits them. And that’s exactly what we should all do – be the best ‘us’.
It’s worth watching and a great reminder that our ideal strategy is probably the one that best matches our personality.
If you haven’t got time to watch the video – my favourite have is to turn any youtube content into an MP3 on this link. Then you can listen as a podcast.