The number one goal for any new company should ALWAYS be to do one thing and do it very well. This is an old saying, but if it’s not something on your mind from the beginning and a foundation of your company, then you can very easily lose sight of what you’re trying to accomplish and become a “vague” company with a wandering identity.
Take a look at a few big time companies to see how they became successful. Amazon.com started as the best online service for distributing books through an online service. Google is immediately known for their search engine capabilities. Honda Motor Company is synonymous with top quality automobiles. Each of these companies has a number of other products they sell, but their corporate identity is unmistakable because they continue to do what they were originally founded on better than anyone else in the business. Honeycat Cosmetics, started by a mentor and friend of mine, is another wonderful example of this concept. They found their competitive edge in the world of cosmetics and have done very well because of their discipline in sticking to what they do best.
Back in 2003, some friends and I launched our first company. We wanted to do it all. We were a couple of young guns straight out of college trying to find our place in the business world. In fact, our corporate slogan “Forward-thinking ideas, reinventing today” was reflective of this broad ambition. This approach is fine if you’re an already established business ready to expand your operations, but it isn’t a smart approach when you are a small start-up with no significant financial backing.
I’m going to swallow my pride here and say from the onset, I should have listened to my older brother. He tried to convince me that we should focus on the first product we created. It was a mobile product that allowed consumers at large venues to send text messages and pictures to jumbotrons and other large screen displays. It incorporated streaming video so that one venue could see and text to another venue anywhere in the world. It was solid, impressive, and definitely had an advantage over any of our competitors from a technical standpoint. Unfortunately, I was like a kid in a toy store; as soon as someone whispered a new concept for a product in my ear, there I went dropping the old product to race to the shiny new one. We had a whole suite of products to sell, but not enough customers buying them.
If we would’ve taken all of that R&D time and instead focused 100% of our efforts on selling what we had, I believe things would’ve been different. We’re talking back in 2003 when things like texting for charities, large venue voting and mobile fan clubs were just a blip in the technology radar. Just one of those products could have sky-rocketed our company to a large mobile technology firm. I wish I could go back in a time machine and warn myself of this because I think this is the biggest contributor to the collapse of the company. From that experience comes a piece of advice: Focus on one thing, and build your company. When the time is right and you’re ready to expand your offerings to something new, you will always have your best product to fall back on.
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