I’ve learned that in order to own a successful business, you got to have at least two things - a good business idea, and the drive to sustain it.
In today’s rant, I’ll talk about the former part. Ideas. Or more specifically, types of ideas.
There are a lot of ideas floating around nowadays, and some are good while most of them are bad. Of course, you can say that certain ideas aren’t exactly bad - they are too ahead of their time for puny humans to understand. But here is my counter-point - if people cannot understand it, then it is a bad idea all over.
Ideas are like fast food. You don’t teach a kid how to use the fork and knife properly in order for him to eat a burger. You tell him to pick it up and start eating. Good ideas always come out and send you into that “hey, this could work” or “fucking hell, why didn’t I think about that in the first place” realm, and those are the ones that gets your attention and most of the time, those are the ones that you’ll want to put your money into.
Bad ideas, even if they are brilliant, requires time for people to understand, if at all. My criteria of evaluating ideas is that if one person cannot explain his idea in one sentence and have it make sense, then it is probably something too complex for the public.
Especially in this Web 2.0 era (disclaimer: I still think Web 2.0 is a hype). Google, for example. Among the giants like Yahoo, Altavista and AOL, it rose to prominence thanks to its unique page indexing algorithm. This is superiority by expertise.
Next, facebook came into existence and kicked friendster’s ass, and now is on its way to becoming a giant that even Google’s Orkut might have trouble wrestling. This is superiority by exploitation.
Then, you have delicious that came out of nowhere and introduced the idea of social bookmarking. This created a whole new trend and now there’re literally hundreds of others trying to emulate its model. This is superiority by niche.
And finally, you have stuff like SaaS that transcended its traditional powerbase of offline solutions to the online world, accomplishing superiority by evolution.
These four different kinds of brilliant ideas work on different levels, but they all share one single relationship - they are all related to each other. For those who wants to brainstorm for ideas, they must explore all four elements to see which niche do their product falls into. This is important because each niche has its own challenges.
Superiority by Expertise
Google kicked everybody’s asses because it’s got a good searching algorithm. And still does until now. If you plan to go this path, you must make sure that you can be the best in what you want to do, to have the best service, algorithm, or idea ever known to the online world. This is how you can tear down the giants and build your own dynasty.
Superiority by Exploitation
For this to happen, you have to make sure the current leaders are complacent and have a dire chink in their armor where you can attack. Sometimes, in the facebook vs friendster case, it is but a classic example of fumbling giants vs elite ants. Friendster had so much usability problems that when facebook took over, it was like a fresh breath of sweet clean air, and from then on its history.
Superiority by Niche
Although social bookmarking started out in the dot com era, the bubble’s explosion took down the pioneers and laid them to rest. Years later delicious revived that concept and gave it a new name. While not entirely, the concept of social bookmarking was literally dead at that time, and in this case I would say that delicious was the one who should be credited with the rise of social bookmarking. This is where one finds a niche of gold vein ripe to be harvested, and wastes no time digging into it. Just make sure your idea hasn’t been done before (or has been done before but didn’t work out and you think you could do better).
Superiority by Evolution
Most SaaS offerings come from the offline world, and it is only natural that with the advances in bandwidth more and more would take things originally restricted from the net due to bandwidth concerns and move them onto the internet, riding the Web 2.0 waves. That was how Basecamp trumped over Microsoft Project, and how companies like SuccessFactors tap danced over Oracle and SAP.
Leave a Reply