Play in 'Unfamiliar' ground?

 Typically you would hear many folks starting up in an area of their experience. Ex Amazon employees starting Flipkart, Marketing folks starting up marketing tech startups, Ex tech company employees starting up another tech start up …. You get the picture.

The logic for doing this seems reasonable. You are in ‘ familiar ground’, you know the play, players, nuts and bolts. You will sound credible when you pitch your idea to future employees and investors. There is more ‘plausibility’ of it going right.

Here is the tricky part. Its ultimately a business which has to thrive on someone ( an individual or a business) parting their hard earned money for whatever you plan to offer. And they will do it ONLY if it solves a good enough problem or brings signicantly more value than the current options.

The tricky part is, just because your credentials are in a particular area, ‘must not’ mean that

• there is a huge problem there waiting to be solved or ( opportunity)
• the current solvers are not ‘good enough’ or that ( competition)
• there is a dramatically new way to solve the problem. ( reimagination)

Be willing to let go off the familiar ground, if you cannot satisfy the above. Remember, you dont control most of the above. On the other hand, you identify an area that meets the above criteria and its not where your past ‘credentials’ are, there is still an opportunity!

Do not let the familiarity dominate the business case. It may not be a ‘business case’ in the first place!

Data as Growth Enabler

With mobile apps, social media throwing up huge goblets of data, its almost criminal not to leverage insights that come from it. Traditionally such efforts need a lot of upfront investments with value from the data unknown. As machine learning/AI replace/supplement human judgement , plowing data for patterns/insights is now almost mandatory. If you are not doing it, your competitor is doing it and is able to cross sell/up sell better thanks to them.

With cloud based infrastructure costs coming down year on year and available on demand and usage based, the barriers/thresholds to leveraging data have also come down significantly. So all the tools exist and its now left to your creativity/imagination.

The data , its volumes, its storage is not all that valuable if the insights that come out of it are not powerful enough. So value is in insights and the methodologies to extract insights. Value is also in triaging the insights to see which ones make most business impact.

If you are able to understand the business intricacies and figure out what insights will tip the scale in your favour in the market place, that’s the creamy part. Everything else is on-demand commodity.