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Page 84 GO IT ALONE!
An additional lesson I learned is that the software would have given us a marginal advantage at best. At the time we saw a business opportunity, so did other companies with far greater programming capabilities. In essence, even if we had succeeded, we would have been quickly overtaken by our competitors, because our success would have been built on a high-cost capability that we did not control—custom software. Each effort to stay ahead of the competition would have broken the bank. To succeed, we needed to invent a business system that took advantage of low-cost resources—such as existing ASPs— and our unique marketing skills. Once we did that, a successful go-it-alone enterprise emerged.
The Rise of the Instant Company
It used to be that once you had your business idea, you needed a lengthy period for raising capital and assembling all of the necessary pieces to get up and going. Now, it’s often the idea and the planning, not the physical implementation, that constrains the launch timetable. Once these conceptual aspects are in place, you can move with dramatic speed to bring the business into operation. This very low cost and easy start-up also makes it possible to quickly determine the viability of a business concept. This represents a true revolution: It’s now possible to quickly test a business concept, refine the idea on the basis of live customer experience, and roll out your business in a few days for a limited investment. There’s another important point here, and it’s a fundamental change: As recently as the mid-1990s, there were probably minimums, in terms of employees and cash on hand, that were required to build a sizeable company. Of course, the numbers differed greatly by industry, and by the sales volume that is considered significant in each industry. But except in a few cases,
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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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