Applied S-Imagery: Planning a Startup
How can an understanding of the laws of system development and the S-shaped development curve in particular help you choose the area in which to start your startup?
Suppose you got an idea for a million, and I want to urgently take it and do it. But how do you know if it will shoot or not? How to insure yourself against meaningless waste of time and money?
There is no absolute way, of course - but something can be done about this.
To begin with, it is worthwhile to determine the place of this idea, what your unborn startup really is:
')
If, whatever one may say, this turns out to be point 2, and you “opened a new Internet”, then this technique will not help you. About what to expect in this case, we will talk some other time.
If you have determined that this is the first option, then it's time to look at what stage of your development the system in which you are going to build your startup. It is best to use for this statistical data on the number of objects of this type: i.e. if we want to make our own social network, then we are looking at the dynamics of growth in the number of social networks (attention: not users, but the number of networks !) over the past few years.
Unfortunately, such data is not always available. A little easier is usually with the data on the number of users of the systems of the type being studied, but here we must keep in mind one important point: you cannot use them in their pure form, otherwise we risk making wrong conclusions without taking into account the processes occurring in the super-system, i.e. in the entire Internet (or RuNet, if we consider Runet systems).
Let me explain with an example:
Based on Yandex’s reports on the dynamics of the Russian-speaking blogosphere for 2006–2009, we can construct the following graph of the growth in the number of blogs:
Those. there is explosive growth and the “Blogs” system according to this schedule should be at the second stage of its development. However, we understand that during the same time, the total number of Runet users also grew at a high rate. Since the final “battlefield” of competing Internet systems (blogs, social networks, forums, online games, etc.) is the total number of Internet users, to determine the real situation in the blogosphere, we need to take into account not so much the number of blogs, how much its relation to the total number of users of the Runet.
For this, you can, for example, use this data and, dividing the number of blogs by the total number of network users in the same period, construct the following graph:
On this graph, we see a change in the dynamics of growth in the percentage ratio of bloggers in the total number of Internet users, which in a visual form demonstrates the beginning of the transition process of the Blogs system to the third stage of its development.
Why is it very important to determine exactly at what stage the system is within which we want to create our own startup? The fact is that for our startup it is a super-system, which means it largely determines the conditions in which it will develop.
Based on the knowledge of the patterns of development of systems, we can determine whether the environment will help a startup grow or inhibit its development. The personal qualities of a swimmer are very important, but depending on whether he has to swim in still water, with or against the river, the results of the swim will vary greatly.
What can wait for a startup at each stage?
Stage I
If the system in which we are going to work is in the first stage, then the startup is in a difficult situation. Honestly, his chances of survival are minimal - around him there is still no “nutritional mix” in the form of a base of potential users, attention of the press and investors, which can push even not very successful projects into life if they start at a more suitable time.
But in a small percentage of cases, when a startup starts a strong team with a clear vision of what it does, as well as resources sufficient to survive and advance its offspring during the entire first stage of the super-system development, the startup has a chance to “shoot”. True, we must bear in mind another big “BUT” - this is possible only if the system itself also grows, and does not lose the “battle for the minds” to more successful or timely systems. You can make a very high-quality project and invest in its promotion 10 years of your life and 100 million, but if you have made it in the same unclaimed sphere, there will be no success.
An example of a startup started at the first stage of the development of the system and “shot” later is Odnoklassniki.ru. At the time when Albert Popkov began the development and promotion of this project, social networks as a class in RuNet were at the first stage of their development - the general population did not know about them, and no one wanted to go there, although they already existed by themselves. RuNet was ruled by blogs, which were then at the peak of media attention and grew exponentially. Having invested a lot of work and money, Popkov survived a difficult time, forced to promote the idea of ​​social networks together with his project in RuNet. Therefore, when social networks moved to the second stage of their development, Odnoklassniki rushed upstairs with them, quickly and unconditionally becoming “social network No. 1”.
There is a difficulty in defining the first stage of development of the system - at this stage it is difficult to obtain statistical data and understand that you are building your project within the framework of a first-stage system. The system is not spoken about in the media, data on its development is catastrophically low, but it is so important for us to determine where it is now - the closer it is to the first break point, after which the second stage and rapid growth begins, the more chances our startup will have to pass up along with the growth of the system as a whole.
Summary of stage I: it is very difficult to start a startup here - resources and a large margin of safety are needed in a team. But if lately there has been a steady growth in the “maternal” system, which may indicate the proximity of the transition to the second stage, you can take the risk.
Stage II
As we already know, the second stage is characterized by rapid growth of the system in a short time. On the graph it is displayed exponentially jerked up. What awaits a startup, which we start in the second stage?
Immediately it should be noted that this fundamentally depends on which part of the second stage we are starting with. If this is the first part of the second stage, when the media is just starting to talk about a “new breakthrough”, this is a very good time to start your project within this system: you are guaranteed the attention of the media and investors, and there are already a certain number of potential users around, who will gladly taste your product.
A good example of a successful start at the right time for the Social Networks system is the VKontakte network. She started later Odnoklassniki, but was able with less effort to achieve greater results and eventually even overtake (according to some sources) Odnoklassniki in reaching the client base.
If the project starts in the second part of the second stage, the situation is somewhat worse: the media is fed up with information about projects of the same type, the news is sarcastically (“another social network started today ... where were these guys two years ago?”). Investors have long invested in previously launched projects and are not interested in additional competition with them. A large part of potential users also already settled down on competing projects; they may and will try the alternative you offer, but whether they want to leave their cozy corners and move in with you is a big question.
However, a project with a clear idea that has real, rather than imaginary, benefits for users, as well as good management and resources for promotion, still has good chances for successful development. Even in the second part of the second stage, the system is still growing, saturated with money and users, and before the third stage, you can still have time to take your place under the sun.
Summary of stage II: this is the best time to start, especially if you managed to jump on the engine at the very beginning. You can not be the first, the main thing to be on time. The further the system moves away from the inflection point, the less chance you have of an easy successful start. But for professional teams, even the second part of the second stage remains an attractive time to launch your startup.
Stage III
Stage when the system reaches its heyday, but ceases to grow significantly. At this stage, the competition between existing players is very intense - they are competing with functionality, budgets and ideas, and it is very difficult to get into this field with your project.
For example, try to create a new blog hosting or forum engine today and enter at least the top ten of similar projects. The task is extremely complicated, as Vladimir Ilyich would say.
It is worth thinking ten times before launching a startup in a system that is in the third stage of its development. With one exception - the situation radically changes, if your startup solves a certain principal thing for the system, eliminates a certain contradiction, which prevents it from developing further at a rapid pace, as it was just recently, at the second stage. If you see that you can change the course of development of the system with your start-up, significantly expand the base of its users, giving them a new, demanded functionality - go for it!
In the case of blogs, an example of such a startup was Twitter, not only “firing” itself, but also giving rise to a new subsystem in the blogosphere - microblogging, which this year entered the second stage of its development (transparent hint :))
Stage III summary: better not! Chances are small, prospects are not pleasant. But if you are a genius - spit on all these rules and fight :)
Stage IV as a time to launch your startup, we do not consider for obvious reasons - there is no need to build a house on a sinking ship.
If you present all of the above in a graphical form, you get something like this:
Summarizing: in this method, the most difficult thing is to build a development curve of the system, within the framework of which you are going to build your startup. On the other hand, if you succeed in doing this, you will see its prospects with a high degree of certainty - perhaps this will allow you to make an informed decision and give you additional confidence in the rightness of your business or secure it against the loss of time and money.
And in the end - a little life hacking, which can be used (and many use it in reality): the fact that Runet lags behind the global (primarily American) Internet is a fairly well-known fact. So, “our” systems in their development, in general, are always half a step behind their foreign counterparts - foreign ones go to the second stage while ours are hanging out at the first. From here is a simple and painful algorithm: we look at what is popular in Burzhnet now, we are doing our own analogue with painting for Khokhloma - and voila - just in time for readiness, our startup falls on the take-off of the corresponding S type in Runet. I think the examples of such a “global copy-paste” here make no sense. Is it bad? May be. But it can be economically feasible. So everyone chooses for himself.
Disclaimer:
Suppose you got an idea for a million, and I want to urgently take it and do it. But how do you know if it will shoot or not? How to insure yourself against meaningless waste of time and money?
There is no absolute way, of course - but something can be done about this.
To begin with, it is worthwhile to determine the place of this idea, what your unborn startup really is:
- 1. This is a project within the framework of existing systems - for example, a social network for pensioners / pioneers / policemen, or a mashup, or some kind of auxiliary project such as social network search, etc.
- 2. Something completely new, not fitting into existing systems, Next Big Thing of the Internet
')
If, whatever one may say, this turns out to be point 2, and you “opened a new Internet”, then this technique will not help you. About what to expect in this case, we will talk some other time.
If you have determined that this is the first option, then it's time to look at what stage of your development the system in which you are going to build your startup. It is best to use for this statistical data on the number of objects of this type: i.e. if we want to make our own social network, then we are looking at the dynamics of growth in the number of social networks (attention: not users, but the number of networks !) over the past few years.
Unfortunately, such data is not always available. A little easier is usually with the data on the number of users of the systems of the type being studied, but here we must keep in mind one important point: you cannot use them in their pure form, otherwise we risk making wrong conclusions without taking into account the processes occurring in the super-system, i.e. in the entire Internet (or RuNet, if we consider Runet systems).
Let me explain with an example:
Based on Yandex’s reports on the dynamics of the Russian-speaking blogosphere for 2006–2009, we can construct the following graph of the growth in the number of blogs:
Those. there is explosive growth and the “Blogs” system according to this schedule should be at the second stage of its development. However, we understand that during the same time, the total number of Runet users also grew at a high rate. Since the final “battlefield” of competing Internet systems (blogs, social networks, forums, online games, etc.) is the total number of Internet users, to determine the real situation in the blogosphere, we need to take into account not so much the number of blogs, how much its relation to the total number of users of the Runet.
For this, you can, for example, use this data and, dividing the number of blogs by the total number of network users in the same period, construct the following graph:
On this graph, we see a change in the dynamics of growth in the percentage ratio of bloggers in the total number of Internet users, which in a visual form demonstrates the beginning of the transition process of the Blogs system to the third stage of its development.
Why is it very important to determine exactly at what stage the system is within which we want to create our own startup? The fact is that for our startup it is a super-system, which means it largely determines the conditions in which it will develop.
Based on the knowledge of the patterns of development of systems, we can determine whether the environment will help a startup grow or inhibit its development. The personal qualities of a swimmer are very important, but depending on whether he has to swim in still water, with or against the river, the results of the swim will vary greatly.
What can wait for a startup at each stage?
Stage I
If the system in which we are going to work is in the first stage, then the startup is in a difficult situation. Honestly, his chances of survival are minimal - around him there is still no “nutritional mix” in the form of a base of potential users, attention of the press and investors, which can push even not very successful projects into life if they start at a more suitable time.
But in a small percentage of cases, when a startup starts a strong team with a clear vision of what it does, as well as resources sufficient to survive and advance its offspring during the entire first stage of the super-system development, the startup has a chance to “shoot”. True, we must bear in mind another big “BUT” - this is possible only if the system itself also grows, and does not lose the “battle for the minds” to more successful or timely systems. You can make a very high-quality project and invest in its promotion 10 years of your life and 100 million, but if you have made it in the same unclaimed sphere, there will be no success.
An example of a startup started at the first stage of the development of the system and “shot” later is Odnoklassniki.ru. At the time when Albert Popkov began the development and promotion of this project, social networks as a class in RuNet were at the first stage of their development - the general population did not know about them, and no one wanted to go there, although they already existed by themselves. RuNet was ruled by blogs, which were then at the peak of media attention and grew exponentially. Having invested a lot of work and money, Popkov survived a difficult time, forced to promote the idea of ​​social networks together with his project in RuNet. Therefore, when social networks moved to the second stage of their development, Odnoklassniki rushed upstairs with them, quickly and unconditionally becoming “social network No. 1”.
There is a difficulty in defining the first stage of development of the system - at this stage it is difficult to obtain statistical data and understand that you are building your project within the framework of a first-stage system. The system is not spoken about in the media, data on its development is catastrophically low, but it is so important for us to determine where it is now - the closer it is to the first break point, after which the second stage and rapid growth begins, the more chances our startup will have to pass up along with the growth of the system as a whole.
Summary of stage I: it is very difficult to start a startup here - resources and a large margin of safety are needed in a team. But if lately there has been a steady growth in the “maternal” system, which may indicate the proximity of the transition to the second stage, you can take the risk.
Stage II
As we already know, the second stage is characterized by rapid growth of the system in a short time. On the graph it is displayed exponentially jerked up. What awaits a startup, which we start in the second stage?
Immediately it should be noted that this fundamentally depends on which part of the second stage we are starting with. If this is the first part of the second stage, when the media is just starting to talk about a “new breakthrough”, this is a very good time to start your project within this system: you are guaranteed the attention of the media and investors, and there are already a certain number of potential users around, who will gladly taste your product.
A good example of a successful start at the right time for the Social Networks system is the VKontakte network. She started later Odnoklassniki, but was able with less effort to achieve greater results and eventually even overtake (according to some sources) Odnoklassniki in reaching the client base.
If the project starts in the second part of the second stage, the situation is somewhat worse: the media is fed up with information about projects of the same type, the news is sarcastically (“another social network started today ... where were these guys two years ago?”). Investors have long invested in previously launched projects and are not interested in additional competition with them. A large part of potential users also already settled down on competing projects; they may and will try the alternative you offer, but whether they want to leave their cozy corners and move in with you is a big question.
However, a project with a clear idea that has real, rather than imaginary, benefits for users, as well as good management and resources for promotion, still has good chances for successful development. Even in the second part of the second stage, the system is still growing, saturated with money and users, and before the third stage, you can still have time to take your place under the sun.
Summary of stage II: this is the best time to start, especially if you managed to jump on the engine at the very beginning. You can not be the first, the main thing to be on time. The further the system moves away from the inflection point, the less chance you have of an easy successful start. But for professional teams, even the second part of the second stage remains an attractive time to launch your startup.
Stage III
Stage when the system reaches its heyday, but ceases to grow significantly. At this stage, the competition between existing players is very intense - they are competing with functionality, budgets and ideas, and it is very difficult to get into this field with your project.
For example, try to create a new blog hosting or forum engine today and enter at least the top ten of similar projects. The task is extremely complicated, as Vladimir Ilyich would say.
It is worth thinking ten times before launching a startup in a system that is in the third stage of its development. With one exception - the situation radically changes, if your startup solves a certain principal thing for the system, eliminates a certain contradiction, which prevents it from developing further at a rapid pace, as it was just recently, at the second stage. If you see that you can change the course of development of the system with your start-up, significantly expand the base of its users, giving them a new, demanded functionality - go for it!
In the case of blogs, an example of such a startup was Twitter, not only “firing” itself, but also giving rise to a new subsystem in the blogosphere - microblogging, which this year entered the second stage of its development (transparent hint :))
Stage III summary: better not! Chances are small, prospects are not pleasant. But if you are a genius - spit on all these rules and fight :)
Stage IV as a time to launch your startup, we do not consider for obvious reasons - there is no need to build a house on a sinking ship.
If you present all of the above in a graphical form, you get something like this:
Summarizing: in this method, the most difficult thing is to build a development curve of the system, within the framework of which you are going to build your startup. On the other hand, if you succeed in doing this, you will see its prospects with a high degree of certainty - perhaps this will allow you to make an informed decision and give you additional confidence in the rightness of your business or secure it against the loss of time and money.
And in the end - a little life hacking, which can be used (and many use it in reality): the fact that Runet lags behind the global (primarily American) Internet is a fairly well-known fact. So, “our” systems in their development, in general, are always half a step behind their foreign counterparts - foreign ones go to the second stage while ours are hanging out at the first. From here is a simple and painful algorithm: we look at what is popular in Burzhnet now, we are doing our own analogue with painting for Khokhloma - and voila - just in time for readiness, our startup falls on the take-off of the corresponding S type in Runet. I think the examples of such a “global copy-paste” here make no sense. Is it bad? May be. But it can be economically feasible. So everyone chooses for himself.
Disclaimer:
1. Yes, of course, for any system you can find counterexamples, when “everything is wrong”. I do not want to insist that the described technology is the only correct and always correct. However, in most cases it works.
2. Sorry for mnogabukf
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/60014/
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