No matter how you describe the mobile advertising industry – meteoric, lightning-fast, rapidly-evolving – it feels laughably inadequate to characterize its actual pace of innovation and evolution.
When I look at my notes from six months ago, it’s astounding how outdated the technology and terminology are already. Our industry progresses so far in so little time, and will continue to do so moving forward. So how do you stay ahead of the curve and build a valuable technology business when the eco-system and customer needs that you’re building for today will be morphed into something completely different tomorrow?
Have Vision, and Make Sure It’s Forward-Looking
Everyone knows that fixing your gaze in the rear-view mirror is foolish, but swivel-heading to your right and left can be just as detrimental.
Keep tabs on your competition, but focusing on little else – like the thousand other factors that determine your market’s evolution – can give you real tunnel vision. Besides, those guys that you’ve decided to emulate or techno-stalk… those guys that you think have landed on the key to success, may be any one of the following things:
- Working on a different strategy than you are
- Working with different circumstances (funding, acquisition interest, strategic partners) than you are
- Clueless
- Crazy
Always look, plan, and build forward based on what your customers need (hint: ask them!), where the gaps in the ecosystem are, and, ideally, where the industry is going to be and what it will need when it gets there. This last one is the hardest to assess owing to the amount of conjecture required to come to a conclusion, but if you can see an inefficiency coming (pent up demand, gaps in technology/solutions) before they happen, what happened yesterday and what Company B is doing won’t matter quite so much.
Be In It to Win It
Those of you that are in it to lose should just stop reading now.
Now that I’ve retained 100% of the readers and (I hope) their attention, it’s important to put your money where your mouth is. “Winning” for start-ups is generally bucketed into two outcomes: Acquisition or IPO. Most start-ups work their butts off to reach either of those two end zones, but if you’re not building a real company – one with a great team, culture, strategy, and products that work – it’s like trying to score a touchdown from your opponent’s 10 yard line instead of moving it down the field first. Possible, but not real likely.
Two big decisions that prove whether you’re “in it to win it” and that require real sacrifice (and often come with a healthy dose of pain) involve hiring and product roadmaps.
Boston is a great location for start-ups seeking highly talented, motivated, entrepreneurial individuals, but it doesn’t make identifying and signing the person that’s going to be a perfect fit for your organization and the position any less time-consuming. Sometimes, instincts tell us to hire the first person that fits at 80+% and start getting the job done ASAP, and that’s where many start-ups go wrong. That person’s impact on your organization – both positive and negative – is going to last a lot longer and be more keenly felt than the pain of having the position go unfilled until you find the right person. I’ve wrestled with this problem dozens of times in my career, and never once regretted waiting to hire the right person (and could write another article on the pain of hiring the wrong one!).
Decisions around product roadmaps are even more difficult than hiring, mainly because the negative impact of your “tough decision” is available for all the world, your investors, employees, competitors, mother-in-law, and journalists to see. When a competitor announces a new feature or product, the unspoken question (or, in some cases, rather pointed question) is why didn’t you launch this already, before them, say, a year ago. Your rationale can be sound, your product strategy robust, and your business analysis beyond reproach. But when someone beats you to the punch with a new product, it’s going to feel like you’re swallowing barbed wire for a few days. They’re getting all of the press attention, your head of marketing is giving you the stink-eye for denying him/her the opportunity to put “first-to-market” in the press release, and your sales team isn’t happy to have to face another difficult question from prospects and customers.
Our Experience
We ran into the issue above some months back when we were scheduling and designing the Nexage RTB Exchange. There was an avalanche of empirical and anecdotal data demonstrating that huge amounts of money would be flowing into real-time bidding (RTB) platforms in 2011. We wanted to have an RTB solution yesterday, tomorrow at the latest, and yet I knew that if we wanted to be a serious, credible RTB solution provider, we had to build it “the right way” and we had to have liquidity in the exchange on the buy- and sell-side.
It took several months. We were thoughtful in designing the architecture and coding the platform. It was built from the ground-up to be scalable (handle the volume), efficient (handle the volume profitably), reliable (handle the volume without outages), and flexible (handle the volume, while offering extensibility for new features and functionality). The mobile RTB ecosystem doesn’t currently need all of the headroom and capabilities that Nexage RTB Exchange offers, but it will (see Have Vision section above).
We weren’t first-to-market, but when we did launch, it was with a quality platform that will contribute to the strong, scalable growth of RTB in mobile. Moreover, it’s consistent with the rep that we’ve built for delivering rock-solid platforms along with great service, over-delivering on the promise of RTB to both our supply-side and demand-side partners. The months of not being in the market were painful, even excruciating, but not nearly as painful as a premature launch would have been, and I’ve never questioned the our decision (at least not yet!).
Tough decisions aren’t tough in name alone. There will be doubt, criticism, and loathing, and not all of it self-inflicted. To add insult to injury, it won’t always pay off. But it’s the only method that I’ve seen work again and again, through more tech and product cycles than I’d care to count.
