SpringSters - Technology Savvy Bunch

In this multi-part blog, I am hoping to capture some thoughts I have had for a while regarding MangoSpring’s strategy. First some background:

Assertion #1: The Internet is a beautiful platform enabling unparalleled value creation everyday.

• The Web is a frictionless environment enabling innovation and new business creation at breathtaking speed. There isn’t a day that goes by without some news-worthy innovation.
• Every year there are 3-5 blockbuster innovations (MySpace, YouTube, Skype etc.)
• There are 100s of other mid-size innovations and services around which very successful companies and services are built.
• There are 100s of services that don’t make it and end up in dead pools. Yet thousands of others never even get talked about.

Bottom-line: The Internet is a vibrant and thriving medium for service and business creation. The amount of energy & innovation, both successful and un-successful, everyday is unparalleled to any other medium that has ever existed.

Assertion #2: Mobile is a terrible platform to innovate & create data application-based businesses in.

• Minimal service innovations over the last 20 years.
• Beyond voice, SMS is the only other wildly popular service. A quick look at where operator revenue comes from is enough to illustrate this point.
  1. WAP, Data services, games, personalization (ring-tones etc.)
• New service discovery and associated behavior changes need to happen on a very constrained environment (small screen size, limited navigation, limited resources etc.) making it harder for the platform to lend itself to innovations.
  1. OEMs are good at creating hardware and hardware/design oriented innovations, but are not good at creating end to end network based services.
  2. It takes years to launch anything because of the long value chain and industry dynamics.
  3. By the time a need is identified and a solution is designed, developed, tested and deployed, it is easily 4 to 5 years later.
  4. Because of the time it takes to make a service available to millions of users worldwide, in a meaningful way, the cost to innovate is very high.
• There is a lot of scope to build 10-20 million $ businesses in mobile because of the intricacies of the platform. To build a blockbuster, you have to start on the web.

Bottom-line: Don’t try to innovate a new data service in the mobile space first; your chances of success are small. Only a handful of mobile focused companies will be successful because of the amount of inherent friction.

Assertion #3: Mobile is a beautiful platform to establish a deep, always connected, relationship with your users

• Unlike PC, Mobile is a very personal and a SPECIAL device.
• 3 Billion+ mobile users worldwide as opposed to 1 Billion or so PC users.
• Mobile gives users “freedom”.

Bottom-line: Although most value creation will happen on the Web/PC side first and then extended to mobile, mobile is super important to becoming an integral part of the user’s life and is a huge service differentiator.

As MangoSpring is aiming to create a god-send service that will become an integral part of millions of user’s world-wide, like Google Search, what better platform than the web? Having established that, MS now needs to figure out the areas it wants to innovate in and have a strategy that will ensure it is one of the top companies on the web.

At a high-level, MangoSpring product strategy is SIMPLE! - Relentless focus on its core.

This doesn’t mean that MS needs to do multiple separate products. Actually the exact contrary – to excel in its chosen space, MS needs to be focused on the “core” and features that strengthen the core. To be successful, MS will need to package these features along with the core in unique ways. You can easily find “small” companies like MS that do a lot of different things and advertise many different products. It is very easy to get swayed by the power of numbers - oh, wow, look they have 6 different products! However, spreading yourself too thin rarely works.

Building good products requires the dedication and focus of a sports team at an international level - you have to be at the top of your game. Just like you can’t have the same team play Cricket and Soccer for your country, you can’t have a successful company trying to do multiple products. A startup has to be a one-trick pony to succeed. From initial concept to requirements, wire-framing, prototype, product development, testing, maintenance, support, pricing and marketing - it takes a lot to have a successful product. Very few companies, if any, that I have seen succeed without relentless focus on its core.

MS is well aware that some other fine folks are building companies around what MS thinks are features of its flagship product. Are these entrepreneurs crazy? Are Venture Capital firms crazy to invest 10s of millions of $s in them? Of course not! However, this brings me back to my assertion #1 - a lot of innovation happens on the web everyday, but only a handful of them succeed. At a minimum, most of these companies are part of that innovation cycle.

In summary, MS product strategy should enable the company to package and deliver unique innovative services built around it’s core - better, faster and cheaper than anyone else!

Let us know (feedback@mangospring.com) what you think?

- Anup