Here’s a tip for you future dotcom start-ups with a ground breaking product. Unless your target audience simply throws money at you without thinking, I would stay away from B2B.
The logic is very simple, really. In the interconnected world in which we live today, if your product is truly innovative, the quickest way to promote it is to get it in front of people, and have the highest number of consumers judge for themselves whether this presents them with value. However when you work with other businesses, your innovation faces several challenges.
- With the same amount of effort, you simply cannot get in touch with as many businesses than you can individual consumers.
- When dealing with a business, a single person is usually trying to interpret whether your product creates value for the eventual users. The users sometimes don’t even get a voice.
- Another issue is, even if the decision maker likes it, that person is often not involved with finances.
- Businesses are seldom price takers.
All of the above difficulties are simply not present when dealing with a end consumer. This person knows what he wants or needs, has control over the budget, and is usually a price taker.
(Now if your product is simply something businesses are already familiar with, and your innovation is in the process, not the product, then differentiating by price will work for B2B)
Like the stories in the great books “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and “Blue Ocean Theory”, businesses, both as suppliers and consumers, usually do not adapt, or is slow to move forward with technological progress. End consumers, however, move at a much faster pace and keeps up with the true innovators.
Perhaps this post will signal a change in direction of my start-ups. Pay4Bugs was our first attempt at B2C (it’s a bit of both), and now we’re about to introduce a series of B2C software that will showcase what we can do, not what purchase managers think of our software.
The app store is one saturated marketplace, or is it? While we’re constantly reminded by Apple how there’re over 100,000 apps, and that there’s an app for “just about everything”, keep in mind that this, all of this is nothing new.
Every distribution channel, from print to software CDs to downloaded media, has competition, and eventual saturation. As revolutionary as the App store is, the goal is the same, make damn good apps, market it well, and find success.
However, recently I noticed that many great app developers, by this I mean devs who’ve made one app that impressed me, are now doing “app dev for hire” jobs. This got me thinking. Are these guys out of ideas? have they become complacent after one successful app and are now living off residual income? Or has the first app sold so poorly they’ve become dissuaded? Because honestly, I would never take on other people’s jobs.
To make an app, you brainstorm, you think hard about what people like, and what you yourself are passionate about. For my firm, as we venture into our first iPhone app, we already have 3 more lined in, all great ideas, all ready for some objective-c love and care. When presented with someone else’s idea, unless it’s damned good, you just don’t treat it with as much care and passion.
Our first app should be in the app store by year’s end, now hopefully we back up our words with one truly nice creation.
“Apps”, or applications running natively on smart phones are all the rage nowadays, with television commercials constantly reminding you that whatever it is you want to do in life, there’s an app for that. What many people didn’t know is that apps are nothing new. When your company develops a mobile strategy, should you go straight for an app? Lets take a look at the mobile world for the past 10 years.
Apps on mobile devices are actually nothing new. Kids have been programming makeshift games into their Texas Instruments calculators for years, and showing off to each other during math class. 
In the late 90s to early 2000s, people using Symbian powered smartphones (mostly Nokias and Sony Ericsson devices) and Windows Mobile OS smart phones/PDAs have been downloading applications to run natively on their devices. However back then, the mobile experience was slow, so you’re basically forced to download what you need ahead of time from your home computer, and try to install it before you hit the road. Lets just say it wasn’t the easiest experience.
So while “apps” were readily available since the turn of the century, the “big thing” at that time was WAP-optimized websites. The goal is to recreate the success of e-commerce by creating sites that were optimized for the tiny screens of monochrome mobile phones. This really wasn’t about building something, but rather taking a sledge hammer and stripping your existing website of all colors, pictures, and excessive text. News sites lead the “revolution”, followed by weather, sports, etc. However, the screens were just so tiny that people could not get actual commerce to take place on these devices.
AND that’s all assuming you knew how to get wireless data on your phones. In the early days of T-Mobile and Cingular, you really needed patience, research and a geek on call. Take a look for yourself:
Function Setting
Settings Name: Cingular Wireless Internet
Home Page: http://device:home or http://device.home
Session Mode: Permanent
Connection Security: On
Dial-up Number: 14152441012
Gateway IP Address: 66.209.11.61
Authentication Type: Secure
Dial Type: ISDN (on network)
Analogue (off network)
Login Type: Automatic
User Name: WAP@CINGULAR.COM
(All upper case)
Password: CINGULAR1
(All upper case)
Now you probably know why this never took off.
Then came the iPhone, which brought to the mobile crowd what I thought was the most important enhancement thus far. Mobile data plans that worked right out of the box. On top of that, a fully functioned web browser gave people a reason to own a data plan. Flat rate data made it a value, now everyone’s addicted to it.
This brought the second phase of the current mobile transition, web-apps. Using specialized rendering techniques, apply the necessary style sheet to take advantage of the device’s strengths. In the case of the iPhone, the native web-kit supported webapp features took advantage of the touch and gestures of the screen. Many sites were quick to adapt their existing stripped-down WAP site to behave like web-apps, and in the process reinserting the images and dynamic elements that were removed in the early years of mobile internet.
The benefits of a web-app is that it’s free to create, and is not subject to any reviews or restrictions. Plus since the webkit specifications in Safari (for the iPhone) has been adopted by other browsers, it is now much easier to port your designs from one mobile browser to another. Finally you can always leave a stripped down, css-less version for older, budget mobile devices.
Which natrually brings us to the latest craze, apps. While the nature of apps hasn’t really changed, what has improved this time around is the distribution method. Downloading, billing and updating apps through a controlled environment (Apple’s App Store), semi-controlled environment (cydia for jailbroken phones) has proved to be the missing link between developers and users. It seems that everyone’s getting into the app game, including myself through my start-up company Attigo.
Now if you’re a company with a website, contemplating what’s next in your mobile strategy, my suggestion is to go a step at a time. While apps are great, getting word out about your app could be tough. iPhone users still use Safari to browse around the internet, and chances are some’ll stumble onto your site, so phase one should be to build a mobile-friendly website. This is because while browsers on phones are getting more advanced, certain CSS 3.0 elements are still not going to work correctly on your small screen. A mobile-optimized site will ensure you don’t lose any traffic or business when someone arrives on your site by phone.
If you have more time and resources, give it a bit of webapp optimization. I’m always pleasantly surprised when a website gives my iPhone browser than extra bit of polish. I’m sure the Android and Windows Mobile users will feel the same.
When are you ready for your app? that’s for us to explore next week as I look at the mobile strategies for my day job, online brokerage firm Firstrade. And that of my start-up, a software debugging marketplace Pay4Bugs.
