Leveraging Success- The Online Paradigm

I have been bombarded with this concept lately, and it isn’t a new one. It’s been popping up in books I’m reading, mentioned over and over in podcasts I listen to, and mentioned by business owners I work with. It’s an idea as old as the hills, yet it’s still the topic of conversation all across the business spectrum. The concept is leveraging other successes to create your own success, and it is everywhere online.

In Eric Qualman’s book, Socialnomics, he gives one example of a facebook app created by a travel company that allows users to track where they have been and share it with their friends. Along comes a programmer who sees how it can be improved, and he creates another facebook app, very similar to the other app, and his app outperforms the first app. Then along comes TripAdvisor. They see what this programmer has done (he has almost a million users) and they want in. They offer to buy in, but the programmer’s offer is more than TripAdvisor wants to pay (the offer was $3 mil). So, what does TripAdvisor do, they hire an application developer for around $15,000 and build an even better version. As of today, TripAdvisor’s travel app, Cities I’ve Visited boasts 4,869,881 monthly active users! Imagine how much it would cost to acquire those leads in a tradition method. I’d be willing to be you’d shell out more than $15,000. Now of course there is maintenance and upgrades to the app, and costs associated with that, but the figure for acquiring the leads is still super cheap. Even if it cost TripAdvisor $100,000, that’s still only $.02 per lead!!!

This type of action is happening everywhere, and it’s happening fast. Really fast. It’s so commonplace online, that we’ve become used to it. Think about Search Engines. There was Alta Vista, then Netscape, then AOL, then MSN, then Yahoo!, now Google is number one and MSN has create Bing to attempt to recapture market share. In the future, perhaps Social Media engines will even top Google as the number one way to search the web. Each business was able to leverage success on the back of an existing company. Search wasn’t a new idea when Google came along, but Google did it better, and cut down barriers between users and what they where looking for. The concept of leveraging success is in every corner of business, online and offline. I think of it as the birthplace of innovation; or maybe it’s innovation’s point of conception.

How can you and I, as business owners, leverage success? A great way to start is by studying the success of others. By analyzing what other business owners have done, we can begin to understand what happened to make the innovation a success. I think it requires an open mind and the ability to ask the right questions. The ability to see the opportunities surrounding your company, and the ability to act when the time is right. What are other companies in your market doing that could be improved upon? What are barriers between you and your clients/customers that can be lifted to shed resistance? What are other companies outside of your market doing that can be adapted to your business to improve your client/customer’s experience?

How will you leverage success?