Finding Your Niche
Unfortunately, gone are the days of starting an Apple or HP in your garage and taking over large market share within an industry seemingly overnight. The big players (especially in physical technology) have already set the pace of the game and have an R&D budget so large that they can out invest you every single time. Even if you beat them to market by being a more nimble startup, eventually the hammer comes down.
So how do you achieve success in a fast paced, high stakes industry? A wise person once said “there are no new ideas, simply a culmination and mutation of old ones”, this has never been more true than today. If you think about most of the services you use in the Web 2.0 era, they likely don’t do anything too drastically new but instead mashup technology in a new and value added way that makes them the best choice for your business (freemium or otherwise). Take a look at Facebook, is it doing anything particularly new? Social networking already existed with MySpace, but Facebook felt that a clean database driven approach was better ~ and they were right.
Application plug-ins? iGoogle. Web based chat? Web MSN and Meebo. But regardless of mashing and melding services that already existed, Facebook now has roughly 250 million users and growing steadily (Brazil has 190 million in total people as a comparison).
Facebook has carved out a niche for itself by defining a new standard for collective web technologies and created a unique value proposition that has drawn users in masses. How does your business stand out from the crowd? Are you really creating something “new” or just something “unique”? In order to gain users you don’t necessarily have to out innovate the big competition. You do however have to add unique value to your product or service that is hard to replicate or will benefit unfairly from a first mover advantage. These are the types of micro business that will be scalable in the future and lead to specialized success.
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