Steve Huey’s Blog

What standard do you set for your company? To be better than your competition? What about the three people in a garage? Ask Craig Newmark!  He blew away multiple Billion dollar industries with a free or almost free product.  I bet no web company – Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo thought that anyone would come along and snipe them out of a market.  Craig did with a staff of less than 30 people.

You must cannibalize yourself before others do.  Do you have a weak spot that can be exploited?  If so it will be.  I am not advocating selling you high end product for zero dollars.  What I am suggesting is that you must make sure that your point of differentiation provides real value.  Newspapers classified ads created real value for a hundred or more years but when confronted with new technology they stuck their collective heads in the sand and hoped it was a fad.  Their real value (providing reach in a local community) was eliminated and became a commodity.

Trends that will kill your business move slowly until they don’t.

Tags: cannibalization, new products, Value

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 5:28 am and is filed under Start up Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.