Jager McConnell, CEO of Crunchbase shares why there is always an opportunity for your startup to beat the giants. We can’t wait to hear him speak at StartCon.
With Google, Apple, Amazon & Facebook fast becoming monopolies, how can startups gain traction and be disruptive?
It’s easy to become discouraged when you find a behemoth like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, or Salesforce lumbering into your product space. Surely companies with infinite resources and brand recognition can merely blink and make your company irrelevant – what is a startup founder to do? Investors start to shy away, employees grow nervous, and you may start to doubt your own roadmap. Fret not – it may not feel like it at the time, but it’s actually a good thing. They just massively increased your TAM and just became your ideal competitor to beat. Increasing your TAM: Investors always want to know that the Total Addressable Market (TAM) you want to go after is big enough to support a huge valuation of your company. If one of the Biggies is taking a swing at your space their army of analysts have clearly decided that there’s a market here that’s interesting enough for them. Even better, if they’re able to enter your market – your long-term roadmap might have you entering other areas that they’re in. No company ever truly captures 100% of a market – that’s a great place to start.
Your ideal competitor: You have a tremendous advantage over every other big company out there. You’re faster than they are. Every time. That means you can you’ll always be ahead of them in innovation. If they come up with a feature that’s better than yours, you can build a better one in half the time – and it will take them twice as long (or longer) to respond to yours. Be a customer of their product, learn from their mistakes, and iterate faster than they ever could. They’ll be leaning heavily on their brand to sell product and you’ll be leaning heavily on value. In the history of software, value (almost) always wins. Whatever it is that you’re competing with them on isn’t one of their top priorities – or if it is, it won’t be for long. This is your core competency – that’s your advantage.Be the better alternative. It worked for Google (Lycos), Apple (Microsoft), Amazon (all retail stores), Facebook (Myspace), and Salesforce (Oracle). It will work for you too.
For more insights from Jager, hear him keynote on our main stage on Dec. 1st & 2nd.
