11 Suggestions for Not Being a Dot Bomb 2.0 has a lot of useful stuff for entrepreneurs and those who aspire to entrepreneurship. Particularly important was point #2: be a complete business, not just a feature. What’s the service or product you offer to your customers? If you can’t define this without another party’s offering then:
- your value chain just got one step longer, which means your one step further away from revenue, and one more piece of complexity stands in the way of reaching your customer.
- reaching that customer means first selling another member of the value chain on why they should buy (or integrate) your feature into their product, versus simply buying it themselves.Â
Some entrepreneurs believe that being an OEM component in someone else’s business, or a feature added to someone else’s product, will lead to an easy exit. For all but a few, it leads straight to the dead pool.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
