Sometimes, while you are waiting for that amazing Instagram moment when your ship comes in and the entire world beats a rapid path to your door, you’ve got to remember to take care of business. And I mean that literally. Too many entrepreneurs today are so focused on the big, broad score (going viral worldwide overnight and other similarly-extravagant visions) that they lose sight of the many opportunities right in front of them to make deals that can help to pay the bills and keep their business in business.
I’ve decided that we need a new shorthand term for this particular flawed fantasy of massive virality and – for simplicity’s sake – I’m just calling it CCC. (I have my own personal reasons for this choice.) Think of it as “collaborative crowd consumption”. This isn’t about crowd-sourcing or crowd-funding as much as it’s about simple crowd-sharing. We all know what B-to-B businesses look like and B-to-C companies aren’t that tough to understand either. But understanding C-to-C-to-C isn’t as easy.
Getting a handle on how to analyze and evaluate; encourage and accelerate; and ultimately measure the prospects of success for a company setting out to trigger the mysterious process whereby millions of energized consumers suddenly take up your cause as their own; start aggressively promoting and re-distributing your products for free; and become engaged advocates of the entire experience (and of your business) is a much more complex and difficult problem. I’m not sure that there’s any easy or clear answer (and, in any case, even the best of these outcomes takes some time), so I’m just suggesting that, in the meantime while you’re waiting, it’s smart to keep busy taking care of the business that you can secure and manage.
I realize that a lot of small deals aren’t as exciting as world viral domination or even highly visible big wins (and I also realize that chasing too many rabbits can be painfully distracting), but big deals (and instances of really rapid and extensive consumer adoption) present all kinds of issues of their own. They take a lot of time and resources to get done; they’re generally a lot less profitable since you lack negotiating leverage as a young company dealing with big guys and since you’re accelerating (“investing”) in the growth curve well ahead of any expected or anticipated significant revenue streams; and they spread you and your team far and wide. In addition, it’s always risky to put so many of your eggs in any one basket in the early stages of your development.
The old dot.com idea of getting big fast probably still makes sense if your only goal is building a business to get bought by somebody bigger. But even if that’s your idea, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get there and – with scarce resources and constrained capital – going solely for the gold may be actually betting the whole business on getting the big break.
I think that a smarter strategy is to allocate at least a little time and some sales or biz dev talent to deploying your product in the B-to-B market which will often be practically standing there knocking on your door and asking to be serviced and sold. If you’re concerned about your hot new offering leaking out before your grand world-wide launch, you can “white-label” it, strip it down or price it up (as against the eventual consumer deliverable), or impose other time, location or distribution limits on the B-to-B versions.
What you don’t want to do is turn your nose up or your back on business that will pay the bills and bridge the gap to the hoped-for mass adoption. Even in our new instant information world where everyone knows everything in an instant, this is a pretty modest exposure risk and a pretty prudent approach. And it can be quite profitable to boot because the marketing costs can be minimal and, in a real sense, you’re basically taking orders and filling requests rather than trying to drum up demand and manufacture a mass movement.
So while you’re pushing that big boulder up the hill, getting ready to glide down the other side, and waiting for the avalanche of accolades and adoption to appear, don’t forget to take a little time to investigate these additional avenues of opportunity:
(1) Limited Players. Are there one-off cases, applications, promotional uses, or other ways that you can provide your product or service exclusively to a limited number of partners, brands, vendors, verticals, or in pilot programs which will give the participants a new marketing boost, a competitive edge, a novel solution, or a gee-whiz gizmo which will set them apart in their markets from their competition and for which they will happily pay a fair amount of money as a marketing project cost or as a promotional expense in a bulk payment or fee-based transaction rather than on a per-user (consumer) basis?
(2) Alternative Markets. Are there commercial or industrial uses for your product or service which don’t risk large-scale exposure to consumers and which can be priced on a service provider or system solution basis rather than by the bite or even initially free as may have to be the case for ordinary consumers? Keep in mind that these types of deals can often be predicated on higher and more powerful and complex uses of your offerings because of the differences in the skill levels and training of the targeted user populations which may enable them to be more quickly trained and/or – with a little good luck – you may even find that there are groups of users already familiar with and capable of adopting your new tools and technology and readily applying them to existing problems in their businesses. They’ve just been waiting for a solution to come along.
(3) Different Geographies. Are there self-contained or relatively closed markets where you can launch versions and variations of the product or service for evaluation and fine-tuning purposes without letting the entire cat out of the bag? As much as we hear about global this-and-that and about constant connectivity and ubiquitous market information, the fact is that you can do a great deal of testing and limited market trials effectively under the radar by simply selecting the right geographies. There are many towns throughout the country untouched to date by the democratization of data. The trick is to get in, run your trials, and get out as quickly and quietly as possible. Remember that media attention at this point doesn’t matter and mainly doesn’t help. This approach won’t really help you test product virality, but it’s fine for determining utilization patterns and basic product viability.
All in all, the bottom line is pretty simple. You always need a Plan B while you’re waiting to be wonderful. A plan that keeps things moving and makes you some money in the interim is a pretty nice straddle and you’ll also learn - in retrospect and almost every case and business – that the biggest money turns out to be in the smallest sales.
PP: “You Get What You Work for, Not What You Wish for”
