Fast as a Shark in the Competitive Business Ocean

Engaging in a high speed chase with your business competitors might leave you lagging behind. Get an early start, buckle up, and hit the market with your best shot as soon as possible.

Hello ladies and gentlemen! I hope you have been having a productivity blast, you have been protecting your ideas, and you are famished for marketing tips and tricks that can lift your business endeavors up. Buckle up, as now we will be speeding down the road to success without getting a ticket for doing so! Indeed, today I am going to argue that sometimes, speed is all that you and your business need to succeed! So, if you are a thrill-seeker, stay with me and read carefully the messages I want to convey (uhm, well, do not tell this to any traffic police officers in the vicinity, or I will get in trouble)!

Sometimes, people come up with a great idea for a product or a service. Yet, this is just the beginning of the story. In fact, some of those thinkers or product engineers get so excited about the gold mine they have just come across that they no longer see things straight. What is even worse, a significant number of entrepreneurs or innovators are so overconfident in the unlimited potential of their brainchild that they take literally ages to develop it and finally hit the market with their best shot. WRONG! What such people do not realize is that while they are preoccupied with the nitty-gritty and the tinny-tiny details of their marvelous product or their incredible service, they are simultaneously becoming obsolete and vulnerable to competition counter-strikes. Indeed, it will not take long before somebody else comes up with the very same or a very similar product or service concept. And then, lo and behold! Before they know it, they will be out of place and out of time.

If this sounds like the story of your life, then you know what you have done wrong and hopefully, you have learnt a valuable lesson. If however, you believe you were simply unfortunate or you are about to launch your dream product or your amazing service, just speed up the process and go public as quickly as possible! Why the rush? Because by the time you realize it, others will be already doing what you’ve been so meticulously planning to do, the current state of bleeding-edge technology might have rapidly changed, you might have second thoughts about your glamorous idea and its implementation, etc. The bottom line is that at the end of the day, you will have wasted a lot of precious resources such as time, money, efforts and you will be the one to bite the dust. Sad but true.

There is a moral in pulling your resources together and hitting the market as soon as possible. Indeed, the guys from 37 Signals try to convey a very similar message in their most recent book Rework. Hence, I am not reinventing the wheel here, I am just nagging about a mistake that people keep on making. Over and over again. Consequently, I would like to give you a few real-life examples in order to demonstrate the advantages of being fast as a shark. Hopefully, those vivid sad stories will stick. If they do not, uh, well, you will be taking the notions of “overconfident” and “stubborn” to a brand new anti-business level.

Pundits and sages argue that preparation is all. I am one hundred per cent behind such claims, because personally, I believe that good preparation and a good deal of thinking can save you a lot of headaches and trouble. Hence, before launching a product or a service, you need to polish its rough edges and offer the world a neat piece of work. Yet, in order to do so, you have to move quickly and most importantly, you have to be smart. Indeed, you should not let the minor details distract you! Here, I would like to share a somehow recurring story that takes place in both the marketing and the IT worlds. Some people with fabulous ideas often get so caught in the visual appearance of their platforms or products that they miss their chances to revolutionize the online market just because they are not very confident about the overall visual wrapping of their brainchild. Instead of playing the “I am not so sure about the design, the functionality, the feel or the touch” game, it would be a smart move to release a beta version in order to collect some valuable feedback that can point you at one direction or another and whet the appetite of you target audience. In fact, launching a beta of a product or a service is a statement that can be translated as “Hey, we are the first, we are here, come check us out, and expect even better things to come in the near future!”. Nonetheless, people are reluctant to do so, and this, in my personal opinion, is not a smart business move. After all, the very existence of products and services hinges on constant innovation, revamping, and upgrading. In a word, the life of a product is contingent on a succession of constant changes. Consequently, you do not need to get every single detail right at first! Aim at getting at least 85 per cent right and keep in mind that there is always room for improvement. In fact, business entrepreneurs and companies can learn a lot from Google. The big G always releases beta versions of its services and it is looking forward to obtaining customer feedback in order to improve or eventually discard them (think of the recently deceased Google Wave).

On a side note, you cannot live in a constant state of Beta! If you do not take actions to release a final version of your product or service, you are basically indicating that you are stuck and your project is going nowhere. This does impact on your credibility and it is quite revealing of your efforts to instill a new lease of viability into your product or service. Having said so, I can tell you of a company, which has been operating in a private beta mode for more than a year. Needless to say, this company has not issued a single update as to the direction they are taking. This makes me, and many other people, wonder if they have called it a day. Consequently, you might want to take a note and limit your (especially private) beta performance up to two months at most. Why? Uhm, well, two months give you ample time to observe customer behavior, test various features of your product or service, polish rough edges, and glean the insights and the feedback that can help you propel your project forward. Any other explanations as to why you are taking ages to start operating border with pathetic excuses and spell a giant FAIL!

Before officially closing the “Speed It Up” chapter, I want to briefly address an issue that gets both startups and seasoned entrepreneurs excited: grants and subsidies. Yet, I am not going to draw up strategies that will help you get a grand or a subsidy. Instead, I am just going to tell you what many people do once they get them. In general, most of the startups or companies that get some money are short of manpower. Hence, some of them spend a lot of time celebrating their future success instead of looking for the right people who can make their project a dazzling reality. Thus, by the time they actually start looking for let’s say developers, marketers, engineers, construction workers, etc, some time has already passed. Then, before they know it, deadlines are looming, and the project development is still at stage one. This is when things get ugly, pressure starts mounting, internal dynamics are ruptured, and normal work flow stalls. The plot suddenly thickens and the blame game commences. My only piece of advice is to avoid this mess, speed up project development, and adopt hands-on approach the moment you get your grant and/or subsidy. Or else, you are wasting precious time and accounting for your own mistakes and procrastination by blaming others that they could not meet the otherwise impossible deadlines. What is more, you are jeopardizing not only your investment, but you are dashing the expectations of those who trusted you and subsidized you.

So, I am going to stop with my traffic violations for the moment. I hope you understand how important speed in business is! Indeed, as the old proverb goes, the early bird, gets the worm. I will return to my other daily duties now, but I will leave you with the promise of something exciting to come next time around or namely, my take on how much you can afford to give away to secure a business deal. In the mean time, take care, be smart, be engaging, and be productive! Do not forget to share your thoughts with us on Twitter, Facebook, or in the comments section below! Have a great day and rock'n'code!