Our job as entrepreneurs is really to build a business in which people depend on. The best we can possibly hope for is having a group of people at both ends of the value chain who really need us. Not just customers, but suppliers as well.
Suppliers who need us to succeed so they can feed off our success. Customers who need our stuff to get through their months, weeks or days. When we are needed, we are on our way to have a solid business.
Do your people in your supply chain need you to exist?
Coffee isn’t coffee.
Coffee is social facilitation
Coffee is a distraction
Coffee is a ritual
Coffee is a reason to meet
Coffee is micro generosity
Coffee is time out
Coffee is a representation of personality and economic status.
Coffee is very rarely a beverage which is a mild stimulous, or thirst quencher. More often it’s one of the ideas above. With this in mind what other categories are waiting to be reinvented to form part of the social structure. As humans we are social creatures, and every now and again a marketing campaign emerges around some form of product which builds in our genetic social dynamic, and when this happens, the category and business is changed forever. The good news for entrepreneurs is that it’s usually the domain of a startup, not an all powerful incumbent.
While reading SamsMojo earlier this week I was surprised to learn the prices of the top 10 selling iphone apps for 2009. In fact, the price for the top seller was more than 10 times what I expected at $99 – The TomTom navigator app. Not the $3 we’d get as a response if we asked a random sample of people.
Sure, it’s a high price as far as iphone apps go, but it much cheaper than a $500 TomTom. The point for startup is this. There is no such thing as expensive. There is only expensive in relation to the set of relevant substitutes. And when we are pricing our brand or startup all pricing decision need to be made relative to the alternatives.
Seriously, your friends and family don’t care about your startup. They don’t have to. Sure they might pretend to care, but mostly they’ll wish you luck and get on with their lives.
Of all of my family members, only one has ever listed an item for rent on my website rentoid.com At first this surprised me. I thought that having a very broad target audience, they’d like it and get involved. They didn’t. So why we feel the need to seed our new startup with family and friends is beyond me. It’s really a waste of time. If they don’t like what we do, we’ll be offended. If they don’t buy what we sell, we’ll be offended. The feedback is less like to be honest than from a stranger. And most of all we are not going to get rich selling to our family and friends.
Startup blog advice is this: Go direct to your real market. Family and friends rarely, if ever, hold they key to startup success. So why delay the start of said success by launching to them?
I was speaking with my brother today when he nailed the topic of innovation leadership in a few words.
He said; You can’t ask the market what they want, you need to invent it, build it and tell them why the future as you conceive it is better.
I really liked his sentiments.
Financial incentives are only useful insofar as they help people fulfill their physical and emotional needs.
Great marketers and entrepreneurs are able to circumvent the financial bridge and help people with these deep seeded human needs directly.