"However, these disruptive technologies typically address a new market segment or a set of under-served customers" - I would say "over-served" instead. because disruptive technology starts with customers and segments that are overshot by the continuous improvement of incumbents' products
I think that we can stop this debate about whether innovation will necessarily lead to success (financially) or not. I might have one case to against you. One case in Asia: the biggest online gaming company in Vietnam (and also in South-East Asia) called VNG bought license of one game from the Chinese Kingsoft, rebranded it, customized the UI, distributed in Vietnam and now they have $60M in revenue. The key success factor is that the market is so ripe and so ready for online gaming, and the game VNG sells in VN just "works" for those customers, they keep paying for the company for the virtual goods and monthly subscription. nobody cares the originality of the game.
Although I agree about the bad UI part, I still think they're in the process of pivoting and finding early traction, so it's unfair to conclude that they would be a failure (or wish them a "painless death"). Instead let's wait for a couple of months to see what they evolve into, who knows it could turn to something interesting that we'll use everyday
read pick-up materials like "The game", you'll be surprised to learn that even some average people who tried hard to overcome their fear and negative side can become winners (well, in term of winning women), but technically it'll help you more than that, you'll learn how to become alpha, the type of ppl who loves taking risk, like approaching women without the fear of being rejected (just like doing startups). the point is you need to do risky things, challenge yourself, put yourself to the limits, then you'll feel rewarding after all those efforts (doesn't matter much if you fail or not). Hope it helps
tweak your business model, rethink of the who, what, when, where, how, why of your business, like: who else could be interested or benefited from your offers? what when or where does the consumption often take place? Can you shorten the consumption chain? .. questions like these are pretty basic but they might open new opportunities.
I'm a fan of fast execution but I think situation like this requires some times to sit down and think for awhile before doing something next. Read "The ultimate competitive advantage" or "the entrepreneurial mindset", the 1st book introduces a new way to think about competitive advantage, the 2nd book contains lots of great tool-kits for "thinkers" to differentiate their offerings as well as how to stay ahead of your competition, these 2 are complementary. but read "the entrepreneurial mindset" 1st for some tools that can be implemented immediately (like "quizzing", "attribute map", "stratification map" ...)
"I don't fucking want innovation", "You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."
these quotes say it all, what I love from Zynga (put aside the ethical thing) is that they obsessively focus on "action" and "execution", and not "thinking". it matters because action makes the real things HAPPEN, here's why: when someone come and blame them and their whole evil philosophy they can just say that "it just happens. we just happened to build it, users just happened to use it and the company just happened to make revenue. get over it"
startups that want to disrupt big guys can also use this strategy, find a niche that is overshot by the incumbents, offer them a good enough product, but improve the performance on other dimensions that big guys overlook, then pivot. I think this works for both disruptive product in existing market and new product in new market
I agree, we all share the same nationalities by random chance. but why spending too much time thinking about the root of the fact that we all feel proud when some people in our country achieve sth phenomenal, it happens everywhere. It's nothing too complicated or rational or irrational, it's just the emotional conenction that everyone has
The author was confused by the term "long tail". IMO this term is best used to visualize how a model works (Amazon's long tail of books, Google's long tail of niche keywords and search results...), but when applying this concept strictly to a specific model to see if it's a long tail business it can yield biased conclusions. He cannot find one specific album on the store doesn't mean iTunes is a no "long tail" store. Or like when I cannot find a book on amazon it doesn't mean Amazon is a no long tail business. So rather trying to conclude if iTunes is a long tail business by looking for one specific item and see if it's available, a better and more precise way to do it is to look at the stats (quantity of "niche" songs sold compared to the more popular ones, revenue earned from those niche songs ...) to see if iTunes selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities
thinking is one, execution is another. Reading is important, but action is crucial. I have no problems saying that I can think like entrepreneurs, and I believe you can as well, what separates winners from the rest of us is relentless execution. I used to force myself to think of 5 new startup ideas a day, at the end of the week I have to pick one idea to execute because we don't have enough time and money, what I want to say is idea is easy to come up with when it becomes your habit and once your team found a process to brainstorm, but execution really matters, we're still building our 1st startup around 1 single idea among bunch of our ideas from the portfolio. (and the idea has changed dramatically) .
think job-to-be-done, people visit places, they want to share their location and update status associated with those places to their friends, and that is the job they want to get done. Ask yourself how many times you visit a place and you want your friends to know about it (let alone earning discounts or earning awards)? if you have thought about it several times which means you might have a job that you want to get done. Before LCB service, they either use workaround solutions like FB status update and Twitter (tweet sth like (@John's coffee)) to their friends / followers or simply they don't use anything at all, at the very core, LBS target non-consumers, people who know they have a job to be done, but still looking around for a solution.
I agree that this job is not important to everyone, some might buy it some might not, and to think about it further, I think their core priority is to give user enough motivation / incentives to use their LCB services, that's why they add Reward systems and gaming elements, in other words, give users more reasons to use their service rather than just mindlessly checking - ins, I wrote a blog post about this http://20sth.tumblr.com/post/974848197/how-to-get-users-to-u...
the disadvantages are clear, and I won't discuss about them or cry out for help. What we mean is that we must work double hard to earn what we deserve, maybe you're lucky to live in a country with not-so-harsh startup culture, we're unlucky, we live in Vietnam, and Thailand, and it's harsh here, (I think maybe because you heard the word "harsh" so often in your startup life that now you see it as an everyday word) we have the same dream with the guys in Silicon Valley to build our own startups and be a success, we hope we could make an impact with this project by supporting people like us to continue with their dreams, just by sharing stuffs and experience that helped us survive til this day
yea I think there must be some misunderstanding here, we're not segregating ourselves, we built this for people like us to share thoughts and experience, and support each other. It does not mean that we want other entrepreneurs to use our site instead, it is just an option, when they think they need support from people like them, they can know that there's a solution out there for them
You don't live in the US and your startup doesn't base in Silicon Valley? You have a passion, an idea, but think you don't have enough support from your community? well, it could be harsh for you, for people like us, but the beautiful part is we can change that, and this is the first step, we can form a community for people like us, to share thoughts and ideas as well as struggles in your life as an entrepreneur and we can support each other. we can survive and succeed in harsh environments and we will. It's always better when we're together
I think Thailand and Vietnam have many things in common regarding the startup culture, you were right mentioning that we can stay in Vietnam and be a success, actually, that's what we always wanted to do. The point here is that most people in Vietnam don't give entrepreneurs enough respect, and being an entrepreneur here means you have to bear a great cost of being seen as "jobless", and in my country, being "jobless" is the next worst thing to being a criminal (Actually my girlfriend just left me because I don't have a job, her family rejected me because I don't have a job).
When you go to VC (we have IDG venture fund here, they're the only one fund in tech) to sell your idea, they'll ask you about things like IPs, proven business model, stats about market size, market trends, demographic view and yes, they look at your background carefully, ironically, if you're a businessman with 15 year experience in business and tech and the like and can come up with the "great" idea like Facebook clone (http://bit.ly/c21XyJ) or Linkedin clone (http://bit.ly/96o8lm), chances are high that you'll get the investment. Having relations with government officials is also important here if you want to survive in the long run, especially when it comes to sensitive things like Internet related services like social network or social news ... So, when it comes to new product in new and untested market, you have to do it on your own with your own budget, test and learn. I see many friends of mine gave up their startup dream because they don't have enough support. It's a sad thing, and this must be fixed soon.We want to prove that this is the wrong thing
I'm from Vietnam and we don't have a good and friendly startup culture here. In fact, it's pretty harsh here, entrepreneurs have to face so many constraints outside their control like government policy, corruption, politics, no support from the community, no angel funds etc .. this is not good for the morale, but we know what we have to do to overcome this, bootstrapping is the only option now, we hope that after gaining the startup momentum, we can move our startup to some other places to continue our dream.
ok, consider this quote "An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of the old inputs" (don't remember exactly who said it), so, when you share your idea to others and receive feedback, meaning you'll gather more inputs, and therefore you'll can have more ideas by combining them and you can also develop your initial idea into a better one (again, by combining your initial idea with the new inputs)