tactics Archives - Page 11 of 11

Shifting advantage & contrarian actions

Posted on January 26, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Once upon a time savvy surfers would get down to the beach early. It was the way to get smooth, uncrowded waves. To step into the ocean at dawn and share the tranquil waters with a few other dedicated salty skin brethren.

This was such an advantage that more and more surfers adopted this method of soul (and sole) surfing. Until the point arrived when there were more people in the line up before there was any daylight. You could often arrive at your favourite surf break only to find the largest crowd of the day was between 5am and 8am. It got ridiculous, the crowd had caught on. There is now zero advantage in getting up early to go surfing.

crowded-surf1

I got so annoyed with the crowds, that I decided to sleep in on surfing days regardless. Why get to the beach early and be greeted with the largest surfing population the day has to offer? It wasn’t worth the effort. So I started heading down the coast at either 10am or 2pm. I still avoided midday, but shifted my surfing times to mid morning and afternoon.

Next thing I found was that my ‘contrarian’ actions had resulted in a boon. Uncrowded waves and a sleep in! Turns out most people rarely surf for more than a couple of hours. So even the early morning laggards start to exit the water mid morning. My current example, was two days ago: I went surfing in a very popular location near Torquay, in 37 degree c warm weather, had perfect waves and only one other person in the water at 2pm. No surfer would believe this is happening.

uncrowded-surfing

The point for entrepreneurs is; Like the waves, positioning advantage is constantly shifting. What is an advantage this year, will certainly change next year. But we will never know this if we always accept conventional wisdom of ‘where to be and when’.

World of Venn

Posted on January 18, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

While we are bootstrapping our startups, it’s worth bootstrapping our lives simultaneously. We should be building projects with overlaps, to the extent that we end up living in a ‘World of Venn’. For the ‘un-nerds’ who can’t quite remember the Venn diagram, here’s a simple explanation:

Venn Diagram:
n. A diagram using circles to represent sets, with the position and overlap of the circles indicating the relationships between the sets.

[After John Venn (1834-1923), British logician.]

The reason for doing this is simple. By living in a ‘World of Venn’, we are building intellectual assets which have synergy. Assets which are connected metaphysically. Constructs with similar ideals which can be shared, borrowed or stolen. The people in these worlds often overlap too. They’re often interested in learning about and helping in other areas of our Venn worlds. And importantly when one set dies or withers, it has an overlapping intersection on which we can refocus our efforts without having to start from the beginning.

Here’s a sample of parts of my world and the Venn relationships.

ss-venn-diagram

As you can see my worlds overlap and all build revenue streams.
–   Ideas and experiences from rentoid.com, give me great writing fodder and intellectual stimulation for this blog you are reading right now.
–   Startup blog has lead to more professional business writing I do for magazines and journals
–   My academic career at Melbourne University has lead to more Business writing and an upcoming book on marketing & investing.

The point is – they all feed each other, build on one another and leverage my personal areas of expertise.

Each success in one section adds credibility and strength to an overlapping area. The more overlaps we have, the larger our sweet spot becomes. When we have a great number of overlaps, life gets sweeter and the rewards are greater. This is why ‘work life balance’ is simply a hoax. Work is a large part of our life and should be joyous. To try and find time for things outside of work we actually ‘enjoy’, means we’ve got our life wrong. Once we live in a world of Venn our personal and financial growth is inevitable.

Venn is Zen. How Venn is your life?

Competitors

Posted on January 7, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Competition is eternally existential. We compete for love, money, attention, fame, wealth, recognition, and sometimes, we even compete for food. Turns out humans aren’t the only species who must to compete to survive. All living things must do it. Even trees in a deep forest compete for sunlight by growing as quickly as possible forgoing width for height.

What I find most interesting about competition is how we or any being chooses to do it. When a competitor catches us unaware, they usually achieve this through using some form of subterfuge. Like growing in a smaller segment of the market. Focusing on a neglected geography. And the really smart competitors disguise what they are doing so you don’t even see them coming. A little like Google has done to Microsoft who was overly focused on the ‘desktop’, while the world was moving to web app’s and gathering and storing of information externally.

I noticed this phenomenon first hand recently. My business was moving along swimmingly (which in this case is my tomato plantation). As you can see from the photo below. My Roma’s looked healthy and almost ready for the picking:

tomato1

But upon closer inspection a competitor had been eating away at my market for quite a long time without me noticing. Once I turned around the tomato to inspect the back side of them – I was devastated to find my competition. They caught me napping and had a very big impact on my market share. As can be seen here:

tomato4

How did they manage this?

The caterpillar was smart enough to attack on the reverse side out of view.
His color is exactly the same as the tomato proving an excellent camouflage.
He waited till the market was already developed (by me) and the tomatoes had a reasonable size and were worth attacking – in this case risking his life over!
In true terrorist fashion he penetrated the market at one entry point and ate it inside out. That is, the caterpillar was so deep inside the market, he was completely out of view.

None of this was by mistake. It has been driven by millennia of evolutionary survival and subsequent genetic coding. Nature is smart.

The implications for startups are many. When we start out to compete, the best thing we can do is replicate what nature does. Stay out of harms way. Stay small and unseen. Try and gain some momentum and size. If we’re lucky will have built our share of the market and be ensconced before anyone notices.

(FYI – I picked the tomatoes, and placed them in another location of the garden to let the caterpillars fight another day – they may just leave some seeds which will flourish next season!)