Innovation Drives Markets
BLOG POST ZERO 4-of-5: This blog post is the 4th of a series of 5 posts. These 5 posts were also cross posted to my Linkedin account as a single article
The AR wave will be more than just cool new shit to play with. This wave is a business opportunity of immense proportions. I have always been amazed at how innovation drives economies in a free market. It’s really the beauty of the thing. Consider how some college student innovated his version of MySpace and created Facebook (Isn’t that what happened?). That one innovation essentially created an entire social media economy out of thin air almost literally overnight. Billions of dollars of wealth have been and are being generated, and not just for the founders. How many social media specialists in every corporation, advertising company, and sizable business now have a swelling 401k in a career that didn’t exist a decade ago?
AR, done right, could drive the next big economic wave. However, good ideas don’t always equal good products. Big opportunities don’t always pan out to big gains. Some hard work lies ahead of us to make some good products and see this opportunity turn into gain for us all.
All that Glitters is Not Gold
You need more than a good idea for success; you need to build the right product to deliver the real value of an idea. Even though it looks to me like there are golden nuggets of AR opportunity just lying on the ground, I’ve also learned from my career in delivering technology that you must thread the needle to success. You need to find that specific combination of features, price model, audience focus, etc. to find true product breakthrough success.
I’ve enjoyed a career focused mostly on software technologies for industrial applications and construction (AEC) markets. I’ve been employed by leading global corporations and startups alike. I’ve worked in the areas of CAD/CAM/CAE, 3D Laser Scanning, Drones/Photogrammetry, 3D GPS Machine Control and survey/measurement/positioning technologies in general. I also came up through the Internet 1.0 era involved in early web portals and SaaS offerings back before AWS, Azure, etc. when you had to build your own heavy iron with physical boxes in a secure, rented server closet. In all that time, some of the most exciting innovations, to me, were not the technical achievements. They were more related to the “How” and not the “What” of the products. How they were priced, how they were marketed, how you reached your audience and led them to realize the value of your offering. This is, as opposed to what the exact and most innovative features were.
All those experiences have confirmed for a me a few basic product principles that, taken together, seem to quite often deliver success for the makers and the takers (users).
- Configure existing and emerging technologies into a product vs spending your focus on trying to invent. Build on the shoulders of giants. Giants who have invested their money, not mine, to create the base innovation.
- Faster time to market.
- Potential competitors inventing better mouse traps are not competitors at all but your next mouse trap vendor for your tech stack.
- Build the business, not the gadget.
- There are lots of great inventions, but the best features don’t necessarily win, the best business does.
- Identify your audience and how to reach them.
- Let them buy the way they want
- Make the complex simple. If you can wire together a complex stack of technologies into that proverbial big red “Do” button, you have a winner.
- Make it “feel” free or make the purchase part of a natural progression of using the solution. This is the least resistance path to mass adoption.
- Let a content provider pay for your tool to distribute her content to her audience, so it feels free to them. They will eat it up.
- Of course, let advertisers buy access to your user’s eyeballs.
- Then, let your users decide to pay to opt-out of the advertising once they have a habit of using your solution. This doesn’t feel like a buying decision, it’s just a convenience to improve/upgrade their ongoing experience, something they want.
- Freemium or in-app purchases where a virtual coin slot lets users painlessly, mindlessly buy content, access, feature enhancement.
If we can configure the tech that exists and is emerging, adapt it for the audiences we know best and develop the correct delivery models AR will be a wave wide enough for all of us to catch a good ride.