Archive for the ‘half-baked idea of the day’ Category

Meta-idea: Indispensable Piece In Someone’s Whole Product

Tuesday, December 27th, 2011

Here’s a startup meta idea: Find a company that is attempting to cross the chasm into the mainstream market, and be an indispensable piece in their whole product.

As a recap from the Crossing The Chasm‘s Technology Adoption Lifecycle (chart), the first group of people that gets excited over your product are the innovators / the uber-techies. They seek technology for the sake of cool new technology.

The second group are the early adopters. They seek the benefits of the technology and not for the sake of the technology itself. To satisfy them, focus on building a product that delivers an ROI.

Then one has to cross the “chasm” to get to the third group, the pragmatist buyer / early majority who are more conservative than the previous 2 groups. They’ll wait for a real market to actually develop (as opposed to a passing fad) and then seek the market leader. They want to see a market with a healthy ecosystem of competition / 3rd party support / products / services in the market. To satisfy them, focus developing the market.

So the question is, what companies are crossing the chasm now and need to develop their market? Can you build something indispensable so that they look good to their pragmatists buyers? Microsoft Windows Phone comes to mind – they have the OS but their market of 3rd party app developers is way behind Android’s and iOS’s.

This meta-idea is a bit like looking for someone on the way to more (post-chasm) success and then figuring out how to be an indispensable part of their ecosystem – because they can’t do it all by themselves.

Examples from the book: Oracle’s database to ERP vendors, Rambus’s memory interface to next-gen PCs.

Note: Looks like the book example is a tad out-dated, and I can’t think of any modern examples where the “+1″ piece is indispensable. Presumably, Oracle and Rambus had some kind of vendor lock-in at time of the book’s writing. Nevertheless, the meta-idea still stands. 

Plug: If you’re in a startup, all the more reason why you owe it to yourself to read this book!
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers
Geoffrey A. Moore

Tags:
Posted in half-baked idea of the day, ideas, startup | 1 Comment »

Half-baked Idea Of The Day: TLDR

Saturday, October 9th, 2010

Update 1: Based on initial feedback, I might be conveying this wrong. The proposed idea is not yet another way to find interesting things to read. Example use case: The moment you visit a URL, just as you are about to read it, the browser tells you that “hey, before you read this, this might actually be a waste of your time.”

If you’ve never seen that expression “TLDR” on the web, that’s short for “too long didn’t read”.

I use Instapaper to save things I want to read for later when I have time to read. But just as my pre-Instapaper days, the problem is that my list of things to read grows faster than I actually have time to read and de-queue items from the list. As you’ve heard, “wealth of information creates poverty of attention“. Not a new problem that I’m sure a lot of people suffer from.

We all have our own ways of coping, so I wonder if we could take all the methods (that work) and productize it.

There is an old story about a finance professor and a student who come upon a $100 bill lying on the ground. The student stoops to pick it up. “Don’t bother,” the professor admonishes. “If it were really a $100 bill, it wouldn’t be there.[1]“

The above story captures the essence behind one of my own tactics to cope[2]. (more…)

Tags: , , ,
Posted in half-baked idea of the day, ideas, problem-opportunity, things to ponder about | 2 Comments »

Half-baked idea of the day: Exchanging contact information [update 2]

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

Here’s a half-baked idea that I’ve been thinking about today. I’ve recently made some new friends from a dinner party organized by mutual friends (a pretty common thing most people can relate to, I hope) and I was asked for my vCard. That’s rather unusual – first time I’ve been asked for a vCard. Then I started thinking, how have I exchanged information with new people I’ve met? There’s no one clear easy way. Sometimes we exchange Twitter handles, Facebook accounts, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. by means of writing it down on a paper, verbally, exchanging a business card, or literally pulling out the phone in my pocket and immediately firing an email off to the other person so they’d have my email right away (or I email myself their information so that I can tweet at them later, etc.)

No, I don’t use silly phone apps – I know there’s a million of them. Why? While they are cool and feature rich (‘feature rich’ is not a compliment here), usually they require the other person to also have the app. While it’s great for the startup because they think it increases virality and helps with their user acquisition, I’m not going to try to convince someone to install an app the first time I’ve met the person just so we can exchange contact information. No.

But the vCard request digs at something deeper. When I think of someone’s complete and comprehensive contact information, I’m thinking of the person’s email, mobile phone, work phone, home phone, home address, work address, Twitter username, Facebook account, Skype username, LinkedIn, etc.

It’s still fundamentally a pain in the ass to exchange a collection of such information to someone new. Usually we just ask for one piece of information, and we proceed to create a new contact, and then fill in the other fields later, usually manually by hand.

Is there a better solution? Is there an opportunity for a solution?

Update 1: LOL – less than 10 minutes after I post this, someone in my social network tells me he has a startup that’s attacking this problem. I’ll be looking forward to hearing about this solution ;)

Update 2: The day after, I stumble upon this story on WaPo: “Business cards thrive in a digital age“. Perhaps an indication that all electronic solutions to date still don’t have a value proposition that is powerful enough to “punch through” the status quo (to quote Marc Andressen)

Tags: ,
Posted in half-baked idea of the day, problem-opportunity, things to ponder about | 2 Comments »