Fly Without Wings

I just returned from a very lively meeting on a new service introduction by an interesting start-up focusing the education segment in India (more on this start-up later).

Couple of days from now, I am scheduled to meet another early stage firm looking to launch a hosted service to the small & medium sized businesses in India.

These are bold plans - targeting non-trivial revenues - upwards of USD 10-15 Million within the next couple of years.

Contrast this with a series of similar looking press articles in The Economic Times I happened to glance through this morning while sipping my regular cuppa of ginger tea.

Among other industries, most of the storied IT firms in India (and I happened to work for one of them until very recently) are talking about cost cuts, improving efficiencies & down sizing (no major lay-offs planned though, no not yet) in view of the accelerating contraction in the global markets.

Conservation, safety, and avoiding risk seem to be the current flavor of the season.

Fear is paralyzing. Indeed.

How could then one explain the raw energy, optimism & bold plans I saw in the teams of those start-ups mentioned earlier? An aberration? Odd-balls, mavericks - not able to read the macro level economic indicators?

 I think not.

These firms - and many others like them - are betting on their purple cows (phrase made famous by Seth Godin in his best seller by the same name). Remarkable (and NOT just very good) products/ services targeted at the very edge of the markets. Niche products designed for the early adopters/ enthusiasts of the markets they are targeting.

And these are niches that would give them their 10-20 Millions I was alluding to earlier. And if the story is indeed right, many of these services could potentially go on to become block-busters - making them hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions…

So what does this mean to the many of the big boys stuck by an - in their own words - economic Tsunami? 

While they continue their effort to cut capacities matching the contracting demand, should they not be investing in building a portfolio of purple cows? 

Launching remarkable products/ services for the edges of the market? Finding and unleashing teams of odd-balls & mavericks who would be ready to risk their careers going after 10-20 millions ( a rounding error in a company with revenues in excess of many billions) to build early market positions? 

Do they have systems and processes in place to react fast enough in a completely different marketplace? I guess there’re no easy answers, but I know this to be one surefire way to potentially have a block-buster at hand when the market rebounds in a couple of years.

Do we have a case for genuine entrepreneurship here? Hairy-Bold-Audacious entrepreneurship? Anyone?

Tags: Emerging Markets, Marketing, Start-ups

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 7:34 am and is filed under Emerging Markets, Marketing, Start-ups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.