The Mesh - Lisa Gansky [59]
Mesh businesses that are first have an additional factor to consider. Since they often deal in physical assets, they’re not as easily changed as Web sites. At Ofoto, we could easily test and launch several different product designs in the same month. Kodak and other camera manufacturers needed a three-year cycle to define and build the product. Hardware, such as electronic devices, bicycles, cars, trucks, complicated appliances and equipment, and serious tools, take longer to design and manufacture to scale. The capital involved, the energy involved in making them, and the transportation to move them around is more costly in every way. That’s why it’s even more important at the beginning to engage with customers frequently—to learn what they really want and need before hitting the “scale up” button. Mesh businesses are especially well positioned to learn early and often by continual market engagement (tryvertising) and redesign of the offering. They aim for making regular, cheap, and high-value mistakes relative to those in traditional models.
define. refine. scale.
My little riff, which anybody who’s worked with me for the last fifteen years is sick of hearing me say, is “Define, refine, and scale.” With any business, Mesh or otherwise, you define the market and the core offering. You start to play with people who are your early adopters, and then refine your business offering, approach, and model. You are informed by how people really see the offering, what they compare it to, how they value it (or don’t), and what they’d like to see modified. These interactions are golden, and they are not to be taken completely literally. Investors, partners, and customers may not grok fully what you see. It’s our job as entrepreneurs to create passionate engagement with people around our vision—team, customers, partners, investors, and even the friends who have to listen to our stories over and over.
That moves you into the refine stage. After you’ve iterated and refined, you understand the market better. You understand the sorts of characters that you need on your team and the kind of capital that you might need in a competitive space. Then you scale. You push it out in a substantial way because you feel strongly that you’ve got a tight package and good cred with your initial customer base.
If you have an existing business, discover aspects of your business that may be shareable for different parts of your customer base. In general, people in existing customer bases are more likely to embrace change and try new things. By encouraging feedback from customers and developers, Mozilla refined its offerings and created a steady stream of applications, such as Tabs, Reference Desk for writers, and Personas, which allows users to visually customize their browser. Virgin began as a European airline and built a global lifestyle brand. As noted earlier, Virgin is today in music, clothing, mobile, lending, fitness, and space travel. These businesses all contribute some type of asset to the company and brand, and these contributions ebb and flow over time. Virgin has the mojo to attract early customers with its latest, bright V-objects. For Virgin and other companies looking to extend their brands, a network-enabled share platform becomes an opportune way to try out new products.
It’s important in any business, but perhaps more so in a Mesh business, to identify the group of people who you think are going