Exploited Weak Spots and Real Value
Thursday, August 27th, 2009What 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.