Mukul Sharma wrote an interesting story ”A Little Knowledge Goes a Long Way” in the ET recently.
In the business world too, I am sure we all are aware (and sometimes guilty) of the “armchair reasoning”/ verbose analysis that actually hampers execution - coming in the way of good people shipping good products and services in good time.
It follows then - Ignorance (or let’s say little knowledge) equals execution - which in turn equals paying customers!
Any takers.
How much knowledge is enough to take a call whether to invest in a new product or a service?
How do you know you are ready to ship a product or a service or that it has good enough features?
How do you know that ”good enough” would be “good enough” for your customer as well?
What would you do to get it “right” the first time around? Should you? Does it change anything if you are not in the technology/ Internet business?
…
Does it then follow that the HOW and WHEN of “good enough” becomes the single most critical factor for a successful new product/ service launch?
Seth Godin has an interesting post “Layering” on the successful launch of his blog - that gives some useful pointers.
So does Agile. Social Media.
And, Google with “always beta”.
Noticed a very professional looking newspaper insert this morning about the launch of a new laundry service in the neighborhood.
The tag line - “Cleaned, Pressed, Delivered” - looked cool and snug with a dandy logo. Then there was a prominently displayed URL, mention of multiple office locations in the city - as well as across the country.
Intrigued, I spent a few moments reading the body copy and liked what I saw - here’s the gist of what I found:
What is the service? - At home laundry service
Who is it for? - Upmarket neighbourhoods pressed for time (how do I know? - well I live in one and am generally pressed for time!)
What is the distribution channel? - At home pickup & drop
How’s the service priced? - INR 40 per kilogram of clothes (which works out to just over 1.5 dollars for each pound)
How is it being promoted? - No expensive ads, targeted messaging in select neighborhoods
So what’s different about this given the tons of ways one could do laundry in India?
Well, 3 things:
1. Scale Play - The service seems to be aggregating demand across the basic (currently served by road side shops/ hawkers) as well as advanced laundry requirements (local dry-cleaning chains/ Mom & Pop stores do it right now)
2. Pricing - Unique per unit of weight based pricing (now this one would have required lot of homework)
3. Dramatic Value - For an overworked family they bring tremendous convenience: dry-cleaned quality at your door step
I believe that in an emerging market like India where many of us are now demanding (or rather waiting for) value they should do just fine - as long as they execute right.
And yes, I’m going to check them out!
Bumped into this interesting post on Startups.com by Jason Cohen.
This note sort of ties into my earlier post on why and how entrepreneurship makes lots of sense (and money) - especially - in a contracting economy.
And we (you and I) are at the center of this changing dynamic.
Many of us (certified entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs if you will) felt right and secured doing our thing within the context of larger firms in booming markets.
World has changed since.
Consider for a moment that you are a one-person professional services organization (PSO). If you worked for a larger firm all this while, chances are because it made very good economic sense - chasing the capital gains (stock options-IPO, exits/job hops for astronomical salary hikes) style financial model.
In the current market scenario though, the best you could hope as a PSO is for a dividend play (in this case diminishing salary or lack of it) - essentially based on your employers business fundamentals.
So if you fancy a capital gains model (read multiples of x) then entrepreneurship becomes a very compelling option.
And if you are like me who gives equal weight to the intangibles such as gore & excitement of building a business ground up - it starts to look like a no-brainer!
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?