This week's readings talk about the importance of differentiation, a thing that I think can be a bit difficult. Especially because, as they mentioned, the market is ever-changing. How can you say you can offer something different when any second you don't know if someone else is doing it?
I've dived deeper into this, and it seems like the idea is one of specificity. The other way you could phrase this is "Know Thyself". I've found the easiest way to talk about this is use a running metaphor for an online dating profile, because there's a lot in common with understanding and marketing yourself as a person and understanding your venture as a living, breathing entity.
The hardest thing about last week's pitches is we have identified a problem and, to an extent, have nebulously defined a solution. But from looking into the idea of differentiation, it's really the details that set each enterprise apart. Taking the time to really get to know the venture that you are trying to launch (almost as though it is a living entity in itself), seems to be the only way to differentiate and market it to get the exact audience you want--and get asked out on dates by the guy that's gonna pay for your meal instead of some creepy weird dude with whom you have nothing in common This metaphor will get better, I promise.
In the same way that a dating profile requires you to articulate who you are, what you like, and what you want, I think that questionnaires kind of do the same for your venture. Every single forum where you will ask for venture capital requires that you fill out these sorts of questionnaires, and they're even more probing than a dating website would be. Asking the hard questions about Workbench Studio has already exposed, for me, many flaws and caused many tweaks (as noted last week, some larger than others). But by also asking these questions, I believe it forces you to buff the idea until it becomes something easy to explain because you know it so well. Here is a list of 65 questions from Forbes that entrepreneurs need to be able to answer, and I think it encompasses a lot of the typical questions that come up, along with a lot of hard ones I'm still working on answering: http://www.forbes.com/sites/allbusiness/2013/06/10/65-questions-venture-capitalists-will-ask-startups/.
While many of these are considerations we have had in class, I would suggest actually sitting down and writing out an answer to each one as though it is being submitted to a potential funder (or a dating profile for your venture, if you're digging this parallel). It sucks. It's really hard. But they're realistic questions and by forcing yourself to answer them, you're forced to really dive deep and refine your ideas. Once the unpleasant bits of that are worked out, details can begin to emerge. And more importantly, differentiate.
Here are a couple of examples of organizations that do a good job of differentiating themselves. You'll notice that there's a couple of ways they do it; usually it has to do with details. I think it's key that in more than one place they refer to the visuals and branding. In this dating profile metaphor, it's like the profile picture, it's the thing that's getting someone to click on your page. But similar to how it takes more than a pretty picture to get a date, they usually have something like a great personality to back it up:
http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/branding-differentiate-competition-examples
http://www.entrepreneurial-insights.com/stand-crowd-examples-differentiation/
As you can see, it's not really about revolutionizing anything. Many of these offer products and services nearly identical to that of their competitors. But they have details that they take pride in, like customer service techniques, or making things slightly cheaper. They can make specific promises and they can speak directly to a particular type of person. An extreme example is the Middle Finger Project. This is an organization that takes pride in their irreverence and boldness, a quality that they are using to differentiate their service of business copyrighting.
Oftentimes being able to point out these details means you've begun to alienate some people, but that's good. In the same way that the only type of person that is universally loved is one that is generally too vaguely defined and doormat-y to be memorable (or really get what they want), from everything I've read, an enterprise works the same way. Know thyself, be clear about who that is, and get ready to incur some hate...and more importantly, a loyal following.
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