Building A Story And Being Wrong
If you are starting a new venture needing investment, you need two things.
You need to clearly understand your timing and what trends you are taking advantage of. What waves are you riding? How are you going with the flow?
You need to clearly understand where you are counter-trend. What is everyone getting wrong that you see? Why is it being missed? How are you sure this factor is so important?
Many people have the first point down, they know what's happening in the market. But their products don't take any big risks within that market. No huge counter-bets.
What natural consumer advantage did Apple have in cell phones? MP3 players? Almost none. The wrong product could have been relegated to the same dustbin of the Lisa and the Newton. However the trends were clear.
Apple took its learnings from the iPod and saw something that others didn't.
The UX and the business model approach (subsidized by carriers), however, were radically different than others at the time. So much, that folks like Blackberry, even Steve Ballmer famously ridiculed it.
To attract investors, you need to build a story which starts with your investors being thought of as wrong (ridiculed!) but ultimately proven right.
Easier said than done. Did I mention luck?
Jeremy Smith shared some thoughts, which I’m including in full here [sic]:
Steve Jobs understood that he needed an ecosystem to support the iPhone and to make it work it had to be closed. Which was controversial at the time for Apple. Understanding this was why Apple was a winner. There are always things like that, that often go unnoticed but it’s the reason they won against the competition who was far ahead of Apple. The story of the Boeing 747 is similar. Boeing was on the verge of bankruptcy when they developed the 747. Everyone at Boeing was thinking it would be a huge hot with Airlines but one guy in the company came up with the idea that the 747 if it had the right cargo hull could also be used as a freight carrier. That single change to the design of the 747 was how Boeing was saved from Bankruptcy because it allowed the airlines to entry the freight business and a small company called Federal Express started by 747’s just for freight.
