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Page 83 GO IT ALONE!
flawed. Consumers were interested in a one-stop-shopping service only if it operated in real time. They wanted to buy DSL then and there. Our subsequent research determined that consumers left our site and immediately visited other sites hoping to make an immediate purchase. The jump to a robust real-time service, with a friendly consumer interface, would have been an even greater speculative investment, so we decided instead to cut our losses and leave the consumer DSL market.
Here’s the lesson: In retrospect, I see that we could have organized a small group of people to process these DSL leads at night. They could have simulated the ultimate operation of the software. So remember this: Before you get going, think creatively about ways to simulate something that may take time or money to build. It may sound silly to organize a few people to work from midnight to 3 AM, but the cost would have been far lower than what we ultimately spent on software we could not use, and we would have gained our ultimate answer far more quickly. We would have saved cash that was precious to us at that moment. And just like the Fortune 1000 firm discussed earlier, we had to wait for the software to be developed. That time, which was largely spent preparing other aspects of our failed consumer DSL business, could also have been better used. In today’s intensely competitive environment, one of the advantages go-it-alone businesses may have over their larger competitors is speed. Smaller companies can be more nimble, often acting on new insights faster than larger competitors can. The title of the national best-seller by Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton, It's Not the Big That Eat the Small...It's the Fast That Eat the Slow , makes an important point, which the authors persuasively argue throughout the book. So here’s another lesson: By seeking to design custom software, we also gave up our potential speed advantage. Using ASPs enhances your speed; using of custom software decreases it dramatically.
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GO IT ALONE! Copyright 2004 by Bruce Judson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
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