Profits From Knowing Your Customer Better Than Anyone Else
Philip Greenspun:
If people this young can start successful companies… … old people must really be stupid and lazy. http://www.paulgraham.com/sfp.html is a report on what happens when you give seed capital to 18-21-year-olds so that they can start little tech companies. My personal theory is that most supranormal profits are the result of people who understand one class of customer better than anyone else. College-aged kids generally haven’t spent enough time with customers to know anything at all. They might have a lot of energy, skill, and dedication, but have not seen customers first-hand. The programmers who built SAP, for example, spent years at IBM doing consulting work. After having seen 10+ companies’ problems and built 10+ similar solutions they decided to go off on their own, rewrite it all, package it up, and sell it.
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Cody on October 14th, 2005 at 6:41 pm
I disagree. College-aged ‘kids’ have spent time with customers. Not in a service or sales enviroment perhaps, but are their friends, relatives, and other peers not customers of some market or another? Hearing these people say ‘I wish that there was a product/service that…’, or ‘I hate it when this company does this…’, inspiration can be had for a new way to do business, a product/service, or other insights.
Business Opportunities Weblog en Español | Lo mejor de la semana en Business Opportunities en inglés on October 16th, 2005 at 7:44 pm
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