Pay attention to those Threats!
Take a look at most failed start-ups, what do they all have in common? Some might say poor management and others, poor delivery. However, I am with the camp that many start-ups fail because the founders did not pay enough attention to the threats towards the business idea.
Depending on who you surround yourself with, you are likely to get a lot of yes-men (and women) who will build you up and your business idea. Along with them, you too will fall in love with all the strengths and opportunities that this new business brings. That is, you could be solving a problem that many customers in the industry have - doing a good job at it too. However, you fail to take the time to think about the short and long term threats that this business will face. Next thing you know, these threats become a reality and your business begins to hurt. I think that carefully looking through and understanding these threats could be the difference between success and failure. My favorite business school strategic planning method - Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-Threat (SWOT) analysis should be used whenever thinking of a new business venture with careful attention paid to the Threats! My advice to you - make sure that you are aware of the threats against your business and model around them.
Take a look at a typical case where I think the threats were not fully taken into consideration. Topsy - A search engine powered by tweets. Note that I have nothing against Topsy, and I am not privy to their business model. I am just commenting as an outsider looking in. In fact, I think that the idea behind Topsy is a great idea for a start up.
Anyway, whereas there is a lot of opportunity with Topsy, I think the threats that challenge its existence are plenty. Topsy, like many of the other start-ups that have come up under the twitter revolution face the same threats. That is - twitter providing the same service. In the case of Topsy, the company has been deemed useless since search.twitter.com became available. I can now have similar search results from the source (twitter). Also, Twitter already has great brand awareness; therefore it is able to overtake such a start-up, like Topsy. Besides that, the search giants (Google, Bing) have caught on that real-time search is a market need. They have released updates to their search engines to meet this need. So for a company like Topsy, unless their business model had more to it, they have just got owned!
I want to reiterate, I am not out to bash Topsy - as I mentioned earlier, I really applaud their innovative thinking. I am merely using them as an example to make my point that it is extremely important to identify and know the threats to your business. Replace Topsy with any start-up that you know is creating a business that is built on a new twitter feature and you will notice similar threats. The question is - have they already realized these threats?
