One lens I use to evaluate startup opportunities – and have written about in the past – is, are you offering an Aspirin or a Vitamin? My basic premise is that in order to do business with a startup, one has to overcome a lot of inertia – whether you are consuming and more so if you are a business. One way to overcome the inertia is to literally bribe the customer with an offer or cashback that makes it too good to be true. Another is to offer a zero-risk trial period. In most cases, however, savvy customers are simply asking the question – do I need this? Is it solving a pain point? Or is this a nice to have? In other words, is this an Aspirin (pain killer) or a Vitamin (nice to have).
In many cases, startups flounder because the pain isn’t as bad as founders imagine it to be – and the search of establishing Product Market Fit is really one of identifying which customer will deem my product to be an Aspirin. Hopefully, you find that early and if not you keep iterating until you identify that customer segment, the right positioning of the product, and of course getting the product right. At that point, from a VC funding perspective, the other unanswered questions remain, “is this a large enough customer segment – i.e. is the prize worth winning? Can you get to scale before an incumbent or a copycat can outrun you – in other words, is the pain so strong that nobody will look for alternatives? Is the product differentiated enough – and why will YOU win?
When BlackSwan events like Covid19/Coronavirus occur, entrepreneurs often panic and the first reaction is to slow-down everything, hunker down and wait for “normalcy” to return. While this is typically a prudent thing to do, it’s not always the smartest. BlackSwan events do things for us at 1000x the rate of change than one might’ve anticipated – and often lead to permanent behavioral change. This could mean that a product that seemed like a Vitamin before the event suddenly has become an Aspirin, and better still, is likely to remain an Aspirin for ever.
A few examples in the recent past – demonetization in India that ensured that everyone was made aware of digital payments was an opportunity that Paytm and later the UPI Ecosystem grabbed and India hasn’t looked back. While the cynical ones will point out that cash is back, the reality is that everyone from my milkman to my maid to my mother is now at least willing to accept payments digitally – and as I’ve Tweeted elsewhere my 83-year old #digimom is a PhonePe Aficionado! So people’s behaviors change because they have NO alternative.
Covid19/Coronavirus is an even bigger event than Demonetization because it’s global and has impacted EVERYONE – and its caused a change in behaviour that in many cases is likely to be permanent. Suddenly working from home doesn’t seem esoteric – and many founders I’m speaking with are also pleasantly surprised with the increase in productivity, the higher level of trust and creativity with their teams, the more focused execution, etc. Suddenly telling visitors to wash their hands when they meet you, to do namaste, to do contactless delivery no longer seems rude or inappropriate. Suddenly old economy companies are realizing the benefits of Video Conferencing and not insisting on vendors visiting them – rather they are almost insisting on people NOT visiting them. There are dozens of other changes happening in all facets of what we do and how we interact with others.
If you’re an entrepreneur, what do you do? Do you simply wait it out? Do you watch your competitors morph from the sidelines?
Or do you grab the bull by the horn and say “my time has come“!
Whatever you do, make sure you take time out to try and figure out if some dramatic non-linear change is happening, especially directly or in adjacency to your business – especially one that may do one of two things:
- dramatically increase your market size
- dramatically increase your rate of “adoption”
If you sense either opportunity, then you owe it to yourself to put a skunkworks team together and quickly validate that this is indeed the case and then figure out the fastest path to OWN that opportunity. Make sure that whatever you are doing is going to significantly improve life for a LARGE number of customers. My personal view is that if there are a compelling value proposition and an opportunity to permanently change customer behavior, focus on it and not over-optimize on the business model initially – but that’s a call dependent on your business.
In all cases, however, you may never get this golden opportunity to 1000x your business opportunity and rate of growth – step out of your box, out of your comfort zone and think hard, experiment quickly and make magic happen. That’s the life and luxury of being an entrepreneur! Because if you aren’t – perhaps your competitor is – and certainly some other startup is being born! Disrupt yourself – before someone else does!
A few founders I spoke to about this asked me, “This is a truly unfortunate time for the world – will we be seen as trying to take advantage of this situation”? The answer I give them is simply, “The world will reject whatever isn’t addressing a pain point – and addressing a pain point is not just grabbing the opportunity, it’s fulfilling a responsibility”.
This is an unusual time and certainly an unfortunate time – but make it count!
About the Author: Sanjay Swamy is Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Priven Advisors, advisory to Prime Venture Partners, a Seed-Stage VC Fund in Bangalore. Prime invests in Fintech, SaaS, HealthCare, Logistics & Education focused technology startups that are addressing real pain-points in the industry! Sanjay can be followed on Twitter @theswamy
Please note: The article was first published on Sanjay’s personal linkedin profile.