Over the past few years I’ve become really careful about talking to my friends about what I am planning. Previously, most of my friends were geeks like me. All of them are super smart people, great at solving technical problems with technical bobbles. However, none of them had ever jumped off the cliff to start their own business Actually, that is not entirely accurate. A few had been free lancers, like I am now, but to me that is not quite the same as starting a business.
What caused me to stop talking about stuff with them was the usual barrage of how this idea or that would not work for that reason or this reason. Or how it had already been done.
It gets tiring. So I got some new friends. People who are generally crazier than I am. This time around our commonality is a passion for motorcycles and riding them. The cool thing is that it turns out that a bunch of them have actually started and run businesses. A surprising number of them are geeks like me (none are Microsoft centric though…..), but many have other backgrounds. Accounting, marketing, management, etc. It’s great from my perspective because what they come back with more useful objections and questions.
The main push back I get is: what is your market? Is this idea targeting Grandmas 50 to 70? Club footed midgets who are three to four feet tall? How many people are in the group, do they actually spend money on products like you are creating? and so on. I have yet to have had a geek ask me questions like this.
What brought this to mind were two posts by Alexander Muse:
The particular piece that has me thinking though is the idea that to be successful you need to have no competition and something completely original. I’m not so sure anymore. I’ve had ideas attacked because it was something Microsoft was going to do. “You can’t compete with Microsoft” they would say, and to a degree, even be right. But here is the thing: if the market is so niche that Microsoft won’t consider it, why are you? Why not go after things Microsoft or the other big guys are going after? Why not ride on their coat tails?
My reasoning is this: before a big company enters a market or creates a product they have already done the market research. They have already figured out that there are tons of club footed midgets between three and four feet of height that will buy this particular product. Your choice then is to either directly compete against their product by doing a “Me Too” and differentiating on the details. Alternatively, you can again ride their coat tails and figure out follow on products and add-on products for the big guy’s product. If the product is a coat, perhaps a hat or gloves.
Here is the thing: you might not create the earth shattering, paradigm shifting cool product, but you have a good shot at build a viable business this way. A business that generates profitable revenue. Become good at that and sink those profits in to research and design so your second product has a shot at being different.
Another way to look at it is this: Apple, Microsoft, Google and the rest did not start off with completely original products. Woz’s first Apple was a kit like the Altair 8800 that preceded it. Microsoft’s MS-DOS was just CP/M. Google wasn’t the first search engine. The list goes on. Follow it long enough and you have to wonder if there are any original ideas.
One more detail: do you really want to build a billion dollar a year business? Personally, I want to build a few two or three million dollar a year businesses with a few employees each that I know personally. At a certain point as a manager of a business that grows really large you get disconnected from the business. Abstractions and virtualizations begin to occur. I like being elbow deep in it. So to me smaller is better.