A couple of challenges of being an entrepreneur in the 21st century

Unfortunately I had to miss this week’s guest speaker in my Managing E-commerce class, but this allows me, in turn, to do what I said last week: write a bit about some of the takeaways from Alistair Croll’s presentation.

He stressed the need for entrepreneurs to produce what they can sell instead of selling what they can produce. This implies to launch a product, track the public’s reception, analyse the data, if the results are positive go on with it, and if they aren’t move on to develop another product and so on. This raised my question: What about the costs of launching a product? It sounds very expensive to do that over and over again just to “try”. The speaker’s answer made clear that I was thinking of a traditional way of product launching, which implied costly field surveys, manufacturing the product and distributing it. What he meant was to “virtually” launch the product, using tools such as Kickstarter, online ad campaigns to probe public’s reception, and other tools that entrepreneurs didn’t have before, but currently technology’s making possible.

Another concept that Croll pointed out is the increasingly shorter company’s life spam compared to a few decades ago. Indeed companies become obsolete much faster than before. Therefore, they should invest around 70% in developing their current business, 20% in innovating with a connected one, and 10% in a disruptive one (Ex. Car2Go). This sounded like cannibalization for me, but actually if you don’t come up with something new, your competitor will.