This is the reason that startups succeed despite their many weaknesses.
And it’s a reason to build a startup in the first place. The Important Thing — powerful enough to override all your deficiencies
Note to reader: Founders of social enterprises are usually painfully aware of their lack of resources and the challenges posed by established well resourced competitors. This article offers some ideas on how to successfully compete.
How Startups Beat Incumbents
“Do you feel the crushing weight of the disadvantages facing every new company? No brand, no features, no customers, no money, no distribution, no search engine rankings, no efficient advertising, no incredible executive team, no NPS, no strategy.
How do the successful startups win anyway? Do they solve all those problems at once, or at least quickly? No.
One answer is they pick their battles where they have advantages over incumbents.
The other answer is that they need one thing to go really really right, to overcome the torrent of things that are going wrong.
I apologize in advance for using the dang iPhone as an example but… The iPhone is one of the most successful and important products of the past few decades. But the first version launched with a mountain of issues. It was a terrible phone, ………
But, the iPhone did something so well, that people wanted so badly, they would put up with all the other crap: You could use the internet. The real Internet with full websites and everything. The web actually worked (even if slowly).. This was so compelling, all the other problems didn’t matter.
This is a universal pattern I call The Important Thing.
Break-out products deliver something so fantastic, so game-changing, so important to the customer, that this one thing is sufficient to override the otherwise-overwhelming deficiencies of the rest of the product and company. So great that people tell their friends or force their colleagues to use it too (defeating the lack of marketing). So great that they’ll use it even if support is slow and releases have bugs (defeating the lack of operational excellence). ………In short, despite the startup not having the positive attributes of large companies (brand, service, features, stability, integrations, social proof), the startup can still win because their Important Thing is so compelling”……….
Written by Jason Cohen in his excellent Newsletter, Smart Bear
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