By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon Newspaper
2015 is shaping up to be a big year in Montana for Startup Weekend. With the Billings event already under our belt and three more scheduled this year (Great Falls, Bozeman, Butte), lots of people are looking for startup ideas.
One place that gets a lot of interest is “stodgy” established markets that are lucrative but neglected from a modernization and/or innovation perspective.
It’s easy to point out markets whose former leaders felt things were good enough. Those markets now have to compete with Craigslist, Uber, Airbnb, SpaceX, Apple iTunes, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Expedia, Kickstarter, Zillow and so on.
Ironically, some of these companies have awakened their markets to the point where they are now being disrupted by startups and in some cases, by the original leader in the market.
Things are as they should be in these markets. We earn the privilege to stay in our market every day. When we don’t, we often expose opportunity we’ve ignored, provoking someone to disrupt a market.
Resting on laurels
It’s easy to look at existing markets for disruption candidate because so many existing businesses invite competition simply by virtue of how they treat their clientele.
For example:
Do you work with businesses that take you for granted?
Treat you poorly?
Treat you with disdain?
Treat you like they’re doing you a favor?
When a business leaves you feeling like one or more of those, it’s difficult not to consider what it would take to disrupt them out of the picture.
Want to disrupt a market? Disrupt yourself
Look back at that list. Does your business you make your customers feel that way? If they do, one way to fix it is to disrupt yourself. So where do you start?
Four ways that startups disrupt an existing business (or market) are through speed, improved customer service, decoupling and unbundling. Two of these are forgone conclusions that you simply cannot avoid, speed and improved customer service, while the other two are rapidly becoming assumed competitive angles.
Speed – No one’s resistant to the market’s need for more speed at the same or better level of quality. Conventional wisdom says that it can’t be done – “Pick any two: cheap, fast or good“, but conventional wisdom rarely considers what the startup list at the top of the page not only tried, but accomplished.
Improved customer service – To be sure, there are companies out there that do well both in revenue while treating their clientele poorly, but their days are numbered. One by one, they will be picked off – and I’m happy to help their competition do it.
Unbundling – Unbundling involves separating the sale of an item from the delivery of that item. Expedia is an unbundler. They took services offered by travel service providers and unbundled them from the provider who delivers them, made it easy to buy and search for what travelers needed, sold them and collected their cut. Expedia got substantial market share because they made it easy to find and compare flights without having to deal with each provider’ web site and/or phone tree. Unbundling has somewhat limited scope because it only happens at consumption / purchase time, which is why decoupling businesses started popping up.
Decoupling – A decoupler pulls apart the evaluate-select-purchase process that used to be performed at one established business. Decouplers focus on radical improvement of a single part of the process. For example, retailers face competition from decouplers who might mail samples to someone’s home, allowing them to skip a trip to the mall to decide what they want. Once the mall trip is eliminated, another step in the evaluate, select, purchase process might be removed elsewhere. Any point along the evaluate, select, deliver, purchase process is a candidate for decoupling. While the social aspects of that trip to the mall can’t yet be delivered to your mobile device, there are plenty of other ways to address shoppers’ social needs.
Try Startup Weekend Therapy
Stuck on how to disrupt yourself? Take part in a Startup Weekend. I’d be shocked if a weekend in that environment didn’t provide you with ideas and mindset adjustments to bring back to your business.
Want more? Here are a few links to startup idea resources.
http://ideamarket.com/founders.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
http://www.inc.com/rahul-varshneya/4-places-to-look-for-your-next-startup-idea.html
http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html (this list is aging, but they might seed a useful idea)
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Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him atmriffey@flatheadbeacon.com. Check out the Flathead Beacon archive of all of Mark’s blogs.