Catching the Wave: Early Adopter to Early Majority
In the midst of NSA and back-lash towards Cloud (I didn’t really pay too much attention), I still believed that Cloud is the governing trend in this generation of computing.
Recently, I was trying to nail down some personal investment theses. One of the trends Meng and I debated about surrounded Cloud. More specifically, we both agreed that the “last mile” was where some startups, especially BYOD, B2B and B2SMB, could make significant impact.
In other words, startups that focused on taking an early adopter technology and packaging it for early majority (in certain cases, in Asia, for Asia).
One of JFDI’s startups, Krake, obsessed itself with this trend. I recalled the very week the team read about Geoffrey Moore’s Bowling Pin strategy. While, technically, the theory was to identify the beachhead market and expanding from one segment to another, but by coupling with Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, Krake fit the thesis of riding the shift in PaaS trend (mostly an Early Majority market) and looking for an niche entry (Early Adopter beachhead). Putting it another way: Krake was targeting a group of customers (Early Majority) that were already familiar the PaaS market, and bringing another technology platform (web-scraping) to the mix (to Early Adopters within that group).
I still needed to think this one through, but it was a great exercise to write things down. Thanks to Andrew Parker and his transparent theses online to encourage my first dip at developing this.
TL;DR
- The “last mile” is where some startups can still make significant impact. Capturing the transition from Early Adopters to Early Majority. (Geoffery Moore’s Crossing the Chasm)
- In other words: startups that are taking an early adopter technology and packaging it for early majority (specifically for Asia in some cases)
- Cloud is the governing trend: but we need to spot opportunities to cross the chasm for niche, secure Cloud offering for professional services