Making Sure You Don’t Get Pushed Out of The Market.

This article is written by Milambo Kabeleka, a Contributor Author at Startup Turkey.

Sam Mallikarjunan is the former head of growth at HubSpot Labs, he led the company’s marketing expansion into Latin America, and oversaw the team that built a new market in e-commerce for the world’s #1 sales and marketing platform. The author of the book How To Sell Better Than Amazon, Sam is an adviser and consultant to companies all over the world. He currently leads ReadThink.com, HubSpot’s new executive strategy publication. He was present at Startup Istanbul 2017 where he talked about companies staying in the market.

We are living in the most interesting period in the history of commerce. It took Apple many years to be the unicorn of its time and many more years to be the company that it is., and while we  still take years

We are in a period of a mass extinction of companies. . Big slow companies are in trouble, they are being pushed out of the market as  new ones are coming up. An example would be  the  Fortune 5000 companies. It used to take companies a lifespan of 75 years before it could get off the list and now it only takes 15 years and very  soon it will be 5.

The fundamental nature  of how we work is changing. You can no longer just buy the Uber of your industry, you have to be the Uber of your industry. To survive the market, a company has to be innovative as the competition has gotten harder. Running a company is  more stressful than it used to be. Everybody is alert, upping their game, competing with everyone. If you are not putting yourself out of business, someone else is.

For technology companies, there isn’t enough time to wait for innovation to happen, innovation has to happen from within.

From bell curves showing the growth of revenue over time,  we now have an S  curve. When your curve starts falling, it means, its time to move to something else, another product. The four essential steps ways of looking at the world to make sure you don’t get pushed out of the market.

1.Getting product market fit:

Make something that people will use. Define the user assumption, also known as the user story, showing the job your customer wants you to do. A famous quote for this would be Ford- who said, ‘if I had asked what my customers wanted, they would have said a faster horse.’ What they wanted was to get from point A to B in the fastest and most cost-effective way.

 In tech, it is easy to have a spike in users over a short period of time and then the numbers will go down, this does not show the true product market fit,  what matter is  when people keep using it the app or platform. That is the real market.

2. Getting  the math to work :

understand how you will make money.Knowing how much each customer is worth, and how much will have to be spent for that customer.

3. Scale up:

Are you able to scale the business?  Can you keep putting fuel in that jet and reach for the stars. Investors will want to give you 1million  to get 3million  back. You will need to know how to innovate from within to scale the math and change the curve. When you are really good at keeping customers, you can afford to spend more to get more customers,  using preparation, adaptability, domain experience, intelligence, passion, prior success, brevity, rapport building, and voice quality.

4. This is the part of the curve you don’t want to get to. At this point, the market would have been saturated, with new products coming up. It is best to introduce a new product and move to another curve.

The mindset, the mentality that you go through to make this work is what counts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOfpf7jLsMQ