Watching some of the early interviews of Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos we realize that he just left his job at a huge Hedge fund to jump in on this new internet which was seeing an over 2300% surge in growth by the year.
So Jeff decided that he was going to build a company that leveraged the unique capabilities of the Internet to serve customers, it’s important to note that at that time, the Internet was just in a stage we usually call Category Formation. We’ve seen this before, with AI/ML trends in the past, but none as big as the current Web3 trend.
So you see that in this Scenario, Jeff wasn’t planning on building something novel, he just wanted to build something that could give him an edge in how he serves his customers. Most MBA people will say that there are various strategies businesses employ to grow and scale
Competitor focused
Product Focused
Customer-focused
Competitor focused
When the business strategy is derived from offering better alternatives and substitutes to competitors in their space, one company to highlight in the competitor focus area is Zoho, I could be wrong, but they’ve managed to build a competitor to major US Brands for Mail and Workspace (Google), Zoho Social (Hootsuite) and many more of their product offerings, offering economical substitutions and lower pricing.
Product-Focused
This is best suited for SAAS companies, who tailor their strategy around offering their users the best User Experience possible, businesses in this category will invest a lot in analytics, focus groups, user research, etc just to understand how best to delight users who use their interfaces and ensure that success rate for the outcomes intended by customers who use their product is near 99% with a very high NPS. Slack, Airtable, etc come to mind
Customer Focused
This category is obsessed with making sure the customer is delighted, and their needs are met in the most efficient manner, it can also be similar to product focus, but in a customer-focused business, the product/interface is just a driver amongst many other elements of the business, every new product offering, feature, new business line is tailored towards maximizing the most out of customers and ensuring their satisfaction, Amazon is a category leader is ruthless customer focus.
So if Jeff were to start a new company in Web3 today, what do you think he would do? what kind of strategy would he explore? Watch this interview about how he got this idea for Amazon and why he chose to sell books.
Key Questions to ask yourself
What are the unique capabilities of Web3?
What can Web3 offer today that Web2 cannot?
What compromise can be made in Web3 to support users at the moment since Web3 is still an infant technology?
Happy to hear your thoughts.
This is an interview with Jeff Bezos - the founder of Amazon in 1997. It is very clear that Jeff is already on the right track in 1997