Think big! I’ve always been told to do so. And I do believe there’s always something good in thinking big.
In the process of setting up a new company, or opening our business to a new market, we tend to get naturally constrained by our resources, while elaborating our plan.
The entry ticket we have to pay to get into some new businesses is sometimes (varies from segment to segment) prohibitive. This is mostly true if you enter such markets without a disruptive model but with a “me too” attitude. You’ll agree with me that it is not always easy to come up with a truly innovative and disruptive business model. So what can we do if we are missing the great idea? Should we simply give up, or relegate our business to a small niche? Is it than true that you’ve to “go big, go niche or go home”?
The Long Tail opportunity, more than creating new companies that sell less of more, has pushed many entrepreneurs to follow niche opportunities. There’s nothing bad in doing it.
I do believe that we need to realize that our business model should look at our target market size as something that is only temporarily bounded by our resources. Building a platform that houses the relationship we have with our customers is becoming more and more important. What if we start small, with a small market target, and than we are hit by success? Is our model going to require us to linear grow our invested resources? I think this is one of the reasons many small businesses remain small.
What if we build a business model around scalability? This is not needed when you have few customers, I agree. But skipping this step, when you start your new business, it is likely to put your company in a niche forever.
