Chickens and eggs

Mike Arrington at Techcrunch blogged about Mozes Friday, and raised the possibility that Mozes may be dealing with the classic chicken and egg problem.  The good news is that most entrepreneurs are used to dealing with the question regardless of the business. Whether it comes to raising capital, hiring employees, building product or finding customers, you learn pretty quickly not to care which comes first - you just go and get chickens and eggs all at the same time.  At a higher level however, when it comes to the business model, it's a critical question.

I spent the six years prior to Mozes in the b2b world, having started a company in March of 2000 specifically around b2b commerce.  You may remember Chemdex (can't link to it, but a great case study here) or any of the 2,000 or so companies like it back then.   Despite the promise of massive success if every buyer and supplier agreed to play together in a vertical market, merely assuming it would happen because it made sense if it did proved to be a pretty ugly assumption.  Like Chemdex and a few others at the time, we had to learn at our company that the best way to survive was to prove value in some small but important areas, and then be relentless in demonstrating and replicating that value across the targeted market.

I recently told an investor that I'm not a believer in businesses that can only be successful at massive scale.   It reminds me of the old Saturday Night Live commercial for the  company that made money by changing a dime into 2 nickels and a nickel into 5 pennies.  Massive scale will of course mean massive success, but a company must be successful at the most basic level before it can be massive.  One of the things I love about what we are doing is that we can enable smaller community activities - such as Maker Faire this weekend.

The point isn't that we are going to go after every upcoming cool county do-it-yourself science fair in the world (as cool as that would be).    In this particularly case, we are getting the chance literally to observe our product in action and learn from that experience to advance forward (plus, it's kind of cool having a Microsoft Mobile sign tell folks to text Mozes for more info).  The real target market we are pursuing is different, but our goals are built around demonstrating small-scale value that will translate across larger market opportunities.  Whether that's chickens or eggs first, I must admit I can't really say.

Comments

[simon]

interesting post!