Saturday, October 23, 2010
It's WOW!! - Is it sellable?
Many organizations are working towards some of the great ideas. The ideas which they think can change the world. Working on your idea is always a great thing. But you need to be extra cautious when you want to make money out of it, specially if you are a startup. I suggest you not to work on something which is WOW, which is extraordinary, until and unless you are very sure of making money out of it or you are backed by some investing agencies. The very reason behind this is my personal experience. We have learned it by hard way. Let me share it, so that it benefits the people who are starting their entrepreneurial journey with a great idea.
We had an idea to build a fudge safe job portal, a very first of its kind. Job portal space was already crowded when we thought of it. But we had something different, something which no other portal had. Our portal had lot of intelligence built into it. It had many interesting features like versioning of marks, versioning of joining and releasing dates from organizations. We used to track all the modifications done by the candidate and based on the recorded changes we used to predict the genuineness/truth fullness of the candidate to the recruiters. Believe me, eight of ten persons who had seen the product have told WOW. But was it sellable? Are we able to make money out of it? The answer is NO.
So is the case with many organizations. Heard of Google wave? It was the much talked product in recent times backed by Google. It had many WOW features. It claimed that it will change the way the world communicates. Even Google had to scratch their one of the most ambitious product "Google Wave". But it hardly matters for the organizations like Google. Such things doesn't pinch them anywhere but for their ego. So is not the case with the startups. We will lose everything - our time, our effort, our money and if you are weak hearted then even courage to move ahead.
The lesson here is , We can't sell something because we have a great product. We will have to check its sellability. As told by Sir Winston Churchill "It's not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what's required."
If you want to make money. Build something sellable.
Praveen
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# posted by Praveen S Shastri @ 11:48 AM 
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