I am reading this book called Play Bigger as someone recommended it to me.
One has to ignore the marketing for the authors’ marketing agency and focus on the interesting idea.
The main idea is that companies should aim to define new categories and be the “kings” of those new categories. Yes, this is also an idea that was presented in Positioning. However here there is a focus on some aspects which are interesting.
The main point is that in order to create a new category you should be able to explain to you clients they have a problem they did not realize they had or that a problem they thought could not be solved can be actually solved.
Another important point is that the creators of the category should focus also on making the category viable, by creating the conditions for that. For example, when frozen food was introduced the first company proposing it had not only to explain to clients why they needed frozen food. It also had to provide wagons with refrigerators to the railway companies, and fridges to the grocery stores that were going to sell the products.
Now, why should someone go through this effort? Because the category king normally brings home a large percentage of the profits available to the whole category. It normally benefits from a long-lasting competitive advantage, until the category get commoditized (if that ever happen).
This strategy seems to me to be suitable for companies with significant resources, because building awareness about the problem or about the existence of a solution seems a task requiring a very significant effort. For this reason I wonder if this strategy is suitable for a bootstrapped company like mine.
Of course in our specific case there is also the additional issue due to the fact that we are tackling different problems at one.
While the larger problem is making professional more productive there are more concrete sub-problems we are solving:
- (To some extent) helping companies move an existing application to a new platform and programming language, so that they can benefit from the more vital ecosystem of the target language
- We help professionals who are not developers getting better tools to become more productive. We do that either by creating DSLs and supporting tools or just by providing editors with some intelligence (e.g., error checking)
Regarding the first problem, the level of awareness is much higher. While many companies do not know that it is possible to write transpilers to perform legacy migrations, at least they often realize they have a problem.
Regarding the second problem, the vast majority of companies this is just the way it is: no automation or tool support for professionals who are not developers, besides perhaps some Excel spreadsheets.
For us, at our scale, it is a difficult problem to educate potential clients about the second problem. First of all it is very difficult because the scope it is so large: we should probably pick some verticals and focus on that. Another thing that we could do is to focus on close problems the potential clients know they have and targets those. For example, we could target the fact that requirements are complex to write or that Excel get abused to create too complex custom solutions.
So, this is an hard problem to solve. Probably the hardest problem I am facing, so I am glad that this book is making reflecting on this and I will keep working on this.