You know how people keep telling us that the pace of change has never been this fast and is accelerating ? Actually not so much, or at least not for everyone. It really is unevenly distributed and, much like vaccine rollouts, its concentrated in the rich parts of the rich world.
In the startup world, there’s a lot of attention given to cutting edge technologies. Computers that can beat humans in games like Go, which is great, but there’s still some ‘old’ technology that hasn’t had its time in the sun yet. By that I mean technology that might be ‘obsolete’ for some of the more advanced companies and people, but for many more it still represents a fantastic opportunity to simplify their lives or grow their businesses.
Equally, in the startup world, there’s a lot of oxygen taken up by the unicorns – the billion dollar valuations, and not the hundreds of thousands of small companies who service a niche market by delighting them with a product they love.
All of this talk about cutting edge technologies and unicorn valuations can put people right off even thinking about starting a business when it really doesn’t have to be that complicated.
My company, Maven, is using a low code application called Bubble, to build an online marketplace which serves a small niche in Australia. Once we’re delighting that niche, we’ll move into something adjacent. There’s only two and a half of us and we’re spending almost nothing, but we’re bringing a tried and tested technology to an audience who’ve never heard of such a thing, and nor do they have to now. As Levitt said, they don’t care about the drill bit, they want a hole. So my audience want to grow their businesses and hopefully doing less work than they’re used to in the process. They don’t need to know what’s under the hood and nor do they care.
So how about we play with the toys we have for a while ?