April 25, 2005

New way to keep tabs

Check out Googspy, a new tool from Velocityscape. It's a great way to see what your competitors are up to marketing wise.

Type in your own company name or that of your competitor and you will see what adwords they are buying. You also see a list of who else is buying those words. A great way to make sure you are on top of your playing field, and to think broadly enough about it.

It is fun and really interesting (kind of a competitive spending Zeitgeist).

I've already run it on all of our portfolio companies and come up with some pretty interesting results - both in terms of what adwords they are running and based on this who their top (at least mindshare-) competitors might be.

If you are running a dragrace, nice way to find out where you must go and if you are stealth, where you should avoid being.

For more read the press release.

By the way here's the list for Velocityscape itself.

Posted by johnza at 07:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 04, 2005

Playbook ABCs in the tech market

Nice article in Businessweek from collegue and internet industry pioneer, Brad Silverberg. Interesting how you can use the Playbook ABCs to help sort out what is going on today, whether Apple, Google, Salesforce or whatever.

Posted by johnza at 09:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 02, 2004

Build vs. Buy vs. Take

A frequent discussion within companies (and within VCs too) is whether, in attempting to get into a new business, to build what is needed or to buy it. Obvious pros and cons to each.

Building your own capabilities can help keep things integrated, it can help maintain your control, it may be cheaper, but it can take longer to create and generate customers. Buying into a business has the benefits of quickness, often bringing new customers along with it, injecting new talent or assets to stir up the mix in your company, but may have a lot of hidden costs in the digestion process and hidden gotchas you didn't find in due diligence.

In recently looking at a potential candidate for an acquistion (lots of interesting qualities: recent bad performer, trading below revenue, but filled with useful assets and solid customer base), we discussed all these pros and cons but also looked at an alternative. Don't buy, don't build totally from scratch - take.

Yeah, figure out how to simply target this weakened but larger player and take their business the old fashioned way - smart, direct competition. Some elements for making this work:

• make sure the target has customers worth taking
• make sure these customers recognize the dicey future of their current supplier
• use this issue to make them aware of your alternative
• device a specific switcher campaign
• create specific migration features in your product to make the shift easy
• create specific, attractive migration offerings for them to make it urgent for them to act now
• support them in the migration process with a clear set of steps, etc.
• monitor how well you're doing, their doing and of course how the ailing big guy is doing in response.

This kind of strategy worked really well in the Word/Excel vs. WordPerfect/123 dragraces of the past and it seems to be at least having some impact in the Gmail vs. Hotmail dragrace on now.

Even if you are currently stealth and want to avoid poking a really big player in the eye, maybe there is a more moderate size competitor who suffered badly from some bursting bubble and while on the decline has some business worth taking to help project you to the next level.

Posted by johnza at 05:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 04, 2004

Taking Goals for Granted

Outside the auditorium of our talk today at Northwest Entreprenuer University, I has a very interesting discussion with someone. An old collegue of Rich's had read the book and had a very intriguing bone to pick.

He noted that throughout the whole book and the whole concept fo the playbook, we were, in fact, assumptive about the goals of the reader. At one point we talk about how strategy is important because winning is important and you generally need a strategy to win.

We also, at least in several of the plays and with our Sun Tzu warfare quotations, imply that there winning means someone else has to lose, that you beat someone in a dragrace, that you squeeze someone between a high and low and that you surpass others with your best of both.

He rightly pointed out that this seemed to contradict one of the core principles of the playbook - that you shouldn't take things for granted. That we in fact were taking for granted the notion that people wanted to be competitive, that "winning" was their goal vs. something else.

This is intriguing. Looking back at real life and all the situations we have faced, with partners, investors, customers etc., somewhere along the line the central role of competition became so deeply ingrained in us - competition for dollars, for employees, for attention, for mindshare, for time - that we take for granted that it makes sense to define goals with this context in mind. But this actually is presumptive for a bunch of people - like my sister and other friends in non profits or other less obviously competitive markets.

I really believe that some form of competition is good and healthy and essential. If you can't think of it you need to invent it to keep things interesting, challenging and moving forward. But that said, it may take doing an even higher level ABC assessment to get people to accept the notion of competition as an important element between where they are now and where they want to be - in what ever way they choose to define winning (i.e. rather than crushing the competition, making people happier, improving lives, discovering something important).

Great feedback and stimulating discussion. Thanks, John

Posted by johnza at 09:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack