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A great entrepreneur is perpetually unsatisfied and always on the search for trouble. They don’t reverse engineer products, but the things we do every day.
True innovators, the kind of people who launch the most successful start-ups, are not always very satisfied people. In fact, they tend to be impatient and annoyed by things that take too long, or that are more complicated or cumbersome than they should be. Great entrepreneurs are constantly looking for trouble.
The question for startup founders right now is: what kind of trouble? With so many accelerator programs, entrepreneurial clusters and big businesses attempting to become more like start-ups, it may become increasingly challenging to identify market opportunities that aren’t already flooded with potential competition.
Is it really worth attempting to create yet another e-commerce tool to sell products, or another online marketing service?
In the past, one of the best ways to gain competitive advantage was through reverse engineering. Just take a best-selling product apart, figure out how it was made, then either replicate its best features or create a version with features that improve on the original.
This can be an important step towards building something customers truly want or need, and it’s altogether possible that the next wave of great startups will work in a similar way, but they won’t be reverse-engineering products.
Instead, they will break down everyday business processes and look for ways to reduce unnecessary steps, to do away with unfulfilling tasks or speed up the things everyone assumes have to be done slowly.
They’ll look at what people love or need to do, identify the less enjoyable parts of those experiences, and disrupt accordingly. They will remove the friction in the customer experience. There are a few examples we can talk about right now.
First up, and predictably, Uber. Uber didn’t introduce the ability to order transportation via a mobile device – we already had that with low-rent taxi apps. It removed the hassle at the end of the ride. Instead of time spent fumbling for (and potentially losing) your wallet, waiting for change or for the credit card receipt, passengers can now simply walk away.
Add a Clipp app, and leave your wallet at home. Uber to a pub, run a bar tab through Clipp, and you won’t reach for your wallet until breakfast.
But we can go further, particularly in the retail environment – and consumers want us to. When will we see more retail services that recognise us via our mobile device the moment we walk into a store and simply charge items to our account rather than make us line up at a checkout?
The future of shopping is not just bringing payments to the smartphone. It’s a simplified customer experience – it will no longer involve going through the motions of paying at all.
Wealth management services were once only available to the highest income earners. That’s partly because financial institutions needed to put considerable resources, like dedicated investment advisers, in place to serve clients appropriately.
More recently though, analytics and algorithms have spawned start-ups known as ‘robo-advisers’ that essentially bring the same convenience of investment assistance to everybody.
In this example, the ‘thing people love or need to do’ is turn their money into more money, and the ‘friction’ is only being able to do this with a lot of money.
We’re now seeing similar innovations springing up in other finance service processes, not only between banks and their retail customers, but between a variety of borrowers, lenders and investors.
Even the generation of sales comes with extra steps that can benefit from software-driven automation. That’s why Salesforce Ventures invested in Apptus, which handles contracts and payment collection, among other things.
There are bound to be more start-ups that find their sweet spot in simplifying those steps that come before and after the sale, and which don’t directly bring in money.
So yes, entrepreneurs might look for trouble, but it’s so they can find the solution – they see opportunities in the most irritating and unfulfilling tasks. They reverse-engineer everyday life and, instead of putting up with the status quo, figure out how to make those extra steps a little easier.
The best entrepreneurs looks for trouble because that’s where the bright light of innovation will be needed and appreciated the most.
A bright idea is worth nothing if you can’t realise its potential. And that means having the right tools to save you time and help your business grow. We’re here to help - download our free ebook ‘The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Finding the Right CRM’ to find out how we can help you.
