A few years ago, between 2017 and 2019, I spent a lot of time going back and forth from Lausanne in Switzerland to London, where I was attending a Business School for Startups, willing to launch my own venture.
That experience gave me the opportunity to be seated in an open space full of great founders in Foodtech, Fintech, Edtech, Healthtech. The real goal was not competing with each other or copy existing businesses. What we were trying to achieve was to analyze problems and solutions from a variety of different Industries and help each other in building innovative and impactful solutions by applying similar strategies identifying several recurring issues that everyone was experiencing.
Success is not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen
Ideas count for NOTHING, execution is everything.
How many Oven Manufacturers are there in our Industry? How many Refrigeration Manufacturers? How many Fabrication Manufacturers? Hundreds. Why some of them are more successful than the others? Because of the execution, not the idea.
At the same time, when it comes to digital solutions, EVERYONE seems to have ideas on what you should do, how you have to sell your software and at what price, what you have to offer to the Manufacturers, why you don’t have to hurt some equilibria, why you need to be always politically correct and so on…
The reality is that all these improvised advisors don’t want to solve any Industry problem, they want to solve just their personal problems forcing you to build something for them. And most of the time for free because of the “valuable” ideas they gave you.
Competitors are your biggest resource
In 2019, to mark the retirement of Mercedes-Benz CEO Dieter Zetsche after 49 years, BMW released a viral, classy, and humorous video ad (watch it on YouTube). The ad showed a look-alike of Zetsche completing his last day at Mercedes, only to drive home and emerge from his garage in a BMW i8 Roadster, signifying his newfound freedom to choose, with the tagline: “Thank you, Dieter Zetsche, for so many years of inspiring competition”.
I love competitors. I love talking to them. I love sharing experience with them. They are the only one in the market that can REALLY understand your struggles, your customers, your challenges.
So, you have two ways:
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- get inspired by them – if you choose this path (but you have to look at the most valuable competitors, otherwise you just can’t see the forest for the trees), you are going to push yourself in order to create something unique and disruptive, so the sky is the limit
- copy them – you are so scared of them that instead of risking anything new, you are going to play it safe by continuing a slow decline into obsolescence
Or, there is also a third way, that fits only the braves: create partnerships, enhance collaborations and build bigger solutions TOGETHER.
Don’t fall in love with your ideas, talk to the customers instead
Understanding your customers is the foundation of a successful business. It’s what makes them choose your offer over somebody else’s. It’s what makes them willingly and happily pay premium prices. It’s what ultimately inspires trust and loyalty.
But you have to talk to your customers 1:1. It may seem much easier to send out a survey or lurk around in social media groups waiting for people to vent about a problem. But that’s only going to let you scratch the surface. If you want to create a product or offer that genuinely calls to people because it solves their problem, the absolute best way to do it is through a 1:1 conversation.
And just remember, from ideas to execution there is an abyss. Maybe your ideas alone are just not that great, surprise surprise.
For the uninitiated, this above is taken from the must-see Silicon Valley, an American comedy television series created by Mike Judge, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky. It premiered on HBO in 2014, and concluded in 2019, running for six seasons for a total of 53 episodes, parodying the culture of the technology industry in Silicon Valley.
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Stay data-hungry. Stay data-foolish.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Digital Consultant