Hey Tech Entrepreneur! Its the Execution that matters...

Hey technology entrepreneur... stop what you are doing and go listen to this podcast from the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader lecture series at Stanford. It is Steve Blank, the serial entrepreneur behind companies such as ZiLog, MIPS, and SuperMac, among others. At the 13 minute(ish) mark on the MP3, he says something that I've been saying for a long time... its not the technology, stupid, its the execution.

He's a bit more eloquent than I, and states it this way (paraphrased):

"Of all the businesses that fail, only 10% do so because their technology was inadequate"

What is he saying? 90% of the companies that fail have technology that meets or exceeds customers expectations. So, just because you can build a great product doesn't mean you can build a great business around that product. Ultimately, it is the business that matters, not the technology. Let me know if you need some help.

Here is a great presentation by Steve Blank that aligns with the content of the podcast I linked to.

Customer Development Methodology

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: market customer development)

Finally, if you haven't seen this, after you listened to Steve Blank, watch this... its Steve Jobs describing the market for NeXT workstations.




There... I've done my community service for the week. Now go build something with actual market value!

Barriers to Exit

John Ludwig posted a link to a presentation by Amy Jo Kim at ShuffleBrain titled "Putting the Fun in Functional – Applying game mechanics to functional software". I'm not even sure why I clicked on it, I'm not a gamer, but I decided to check it out. I was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

While the entire presentation is great, the best lesson of all, IMHO, comes on slides 46 & 47: "Customization creates investment and creates barriers to exit". This is huge and it was nice to see someone lay it out like that. We are always talking about lowering barriers to entry, but it is rare to see someone write about barriers to exit.

When building a product, it is difficult to constantly play "let's out-feature the competition". While you must always have new or updated features in the pipeline (ideally developed and ready to launch in a competitive response), the reality is a better product will always come along and people will want to switch (its human nature). Your user, I'm sorry to say, will sign-up for an account (if it's free), look around, go back to the service they currently use, and, if you've done your job, determine that it would simply be too much work to switch.

As much as I have issues with the current crop of social networks, the reality is, they have this down pat. The nature of a "social network" implies that I am actively connecting with other people, and therefore am making an implicit investment. The problem for non-social networks is that you have to work at building this type of user investment. Take the image hosting service Flickr. They have built in a number of features that, to take full advantage of the system, require investment. The user can look at other photo-sharing sites that come online, and probably will, but as soon as they look at the work it will take to move their images and the associated meta-data, this becomes quite daunting and they will stick with Flickr, thank you very much.

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