| How To Prevent Gaps in An Innovative Startup Strategy Posted: 30 Jan 2022 06:05 AM PST  Everyone in the business world has heard of the classic bestseller by Geoffrey A. Moore titled "Crossing the Chasm," but most entrepreneurs have no idea how it relates to them. In fact, it's all about the "focus" required to get early stage technology products across the deadly chasm from early adopters to mainstream customers.
Most investors and startup professionals expand this concept of focus to apply to key issues of every aspect of strategic and tactical planning in a startup. Missions and products that are too broad confuse your team, your customers, and potential investors. There are other chasms out there just as deadly as the technology one, such as the ones below: - Market requirements chasm. The first chasm is getting the customer requirements right, product or service, to satisfy a real need that a large number of customers will pay real money to satisfy. It takes focus to resist adding a long list of features that seem to make the opportunity larger, but dilute to focus of both you and potential customers.
- Product development chasm. Another common chasm is never-ending product development. Focus is required to resist adding a few more neat features, made possible by the new technology, which in fact make the product more complex to use, impossible to test, and very expensive in time and cost.
- Marketing and sales chasm. Lots of people still believe the major cost of a new product is development. These days, with all the clutter in the marketplace, the highest cost is usually marketing. Focus is required here to pick the low-hanging fruit, break through the clutter, and then move on to the next segment. Marketing costs can be a deep hole.
- Customer support chasm. Products that have features which are unfocused, or aimed at too broad an audience, can be almost impossible to support. Customers need lots of help with installation, or can't make the product work the way they expect. The result is that customer satisfaction in unachievable or at least very expensive.
In his book, Moore limits his discussion to the transition between customers that are visionaries (early adopters) and customer pragmatists (early majority), in the context of high technology products that appear "disruptive," meaning they move innovation in that arena to a new level. Here are the five customer segments outlined in his analysis: - Innovators – they love the challenge of a new technology and expect problems
- Early adopters - customer visionaries driven by technology who expect it to work
- Early majority – pragmatists that buy only with peer review, references and support
- Late majority – conservatives who wait until the product is no longer state-of-the-art
- Laggards – skeptics who will only adopt when forced or the need is critical
The reason that his book was so popular, and is still studied in MBA programs and talked about by investors, is because his analysis has proven to be right so many times. There is a big gap between people who love to try new technologies, and the rest of us, who tend to be much more "technophobic." Startups need to show real traction before attempting to cross the chasm. I always recommend focus as the key to avoiding Moore's chasm, as well as the others highlighted here. Start your business with a narrow niche and a focused strategy, but don't stay there. As the company matures, and you learn more about your customers and your market, then it is time to go broader or deeper. Build an overt strategy with feedback triggers to enhance the product to meet the needs of another segment of customers, and add more features to serve additional needs for the customers you already have. With this approach, you will find it a lot easier to jump all the chasms without crashing or breaking a leg. Marty Zwilling |
| 6 Cases When Quick-To-Market Should Be Your Priority Posted: 29 Jan 2022 06:05 AM PST  I know entrepreneurs who have suffered from premature execution often associated with the ready-fire-aim quick-to-market approach. Yet I believe that many more have benefited from this approach, especially in early startup stages. If your product is highly innovative, and speed to market is critical, you won't get it right the first time anyway, no matter how cautiously you plan.
The ready-aim-fire traditional approach works best in more mature markets, where your strategy is to add features and value to competitive products, or address an underserved new segment of the marketplace. These are the environments where you really need extended planning to ensure proper positioning before launching the product. But Lonnie L. Sciambi, in his classic book, "Secrets to Entrepreneurial Success," reminds me that premature execution will doom even a good ready-aim-fire plan. This most often happens due to impatience, which is not typically an entrepreneurial virtue. It also happens due to overreaction to some market surprise, a last-minute input, or a squeeze on cash. Even when a good plan is possible, I believe there are many circumstances where the ready-fire-aim approach is the best alternative, even though it may be counter-intuitive that one can fire without having aimed precisely. Here are the key parameters that can swing the pendulum: - Engineers have an uncontrollable ability to add more features. Many good ideas never get off the ground, simply because the product or service is never "finished." Some entrepreneurs don't believe in the "minimum viable product (MVP)" approach, and they keep thinking they need to get the vision absolutely perfect before launching it.
- Entrepreneur confuses sense of urgency with sense of emergency. Urgency comes from an outbound purpose to get market returns quickly, while handling emergencies is a reactionary inward approach to saving ourselves from the daily crisis. It's easy to be too busy to aim, so ready-fire can get you moving, but may generate the next emergency.
- Impossible to get adequate market information for any given plan. For innovative new products in a "fast-paced culture," entrepreneur leaders can't count on conventional market research or expert consultants to give them the data to build a plan. After you've "fired" once, you have some actual data with which to adjust your aim.
- The target market is moving in unpredictable ways. Marketing is inherently a trial and error process in new and unknown environments. The ready-fire-aim approach works best here, but must be used with a plan to learn from misses and feedback, rather than random shots into the dark. Be prepared for pivots and mistakes.
- Planning cycle for determining certainty is too long. Too many entrepreneurs get bogged down in planning and thinking and never get to the point of action. This leads to another dreaded syndrome, called analysis paralysis (i.e. ready-aim-aim-aim-aim-aim...). If they don't fire before they aim, they may never take action at all.
- Cost of a planning cycle is greater than cost of an execution iteration. Start with a strategic plan that embodies an iterative launch cycle, with a minimum viable product to a focused and limited domain, and the cost of execution will be low. That limits the scope of your plan, makes is more measurable, and forces you to plan for change.
It was Tom Peters and Bob Waterman ("In Search of Excellence") who first came up with the "ready-fire-aim" go-to-market strategy. I like it in many cases, since it is action-oriented, helps streamline and decrease product development time and costs, and focuses the product and the firm on customer needs rather than technology. Of course, if you fire without aiming, there's always a greater chance that you will shoot yourself in the foot. I've even seen some entrepreneurs who quickly reload, only to shoot themselves in the other foot. Making your business a game of Russian Roulette is not the way to success. If you can't plan ahead, at least plan to learn from your mistakes. Marty Zwilling |
No comments:
Post a Comment