Don’t try to build a market as well as your product

This feels counter to the conventional wisdom. I mean, just look at Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay after all. They all did it didn’t they.

Well, in a word, no.

Google improved on internet searches and took out the competition. Facebook is largely a new phenomenon, but is still largely bankrolled rather than paying its own way (the buy high sell low strategy I talk about). Amazon consolidated the mail order book catalogue business.  eBay took the essentials of community auctions and ‘For Sale’ sections of newspapers and put them on line.

Microsoft didn’t invent computers or operating systems – they made it more user friendly, so I’ll give them, IBM, Radio Shack/Tandy and Apple co-credit for actually helping create a market. Mind you, consumers and businesses were ready to adopt 40 years of computer based automation for their own benefit, so the market was ready in many ways.

So, if we put aside the above examples the other 99.999999% of us are scratching round trying to sell our products and services.

An attitude of “build it and they will come” is a particularly good way to lose money.

If you want to build a business in a conventional way then you should pick crowded business sectors.

Put that another way, competition is usually thickest where most of the money is.

Find a way to do the same thing as everyone else, but better, and you will grow rapidly. The market is already primed to buy your product and is cashed up, so you just have to take out part of the market share from your competitors to make a profit.