If you look around, generally in the Indian startup scene, the really successful companies don’t do anything significantly novel.
Big Basket delivers eggs and detergent. Swiggy gets you food. Ola helps you find cabs and autos easily.
There isn’t something very fancy happening on the surface. If I dropped the brand names and pitched the ideas to you, you wouldn’t be very impressed. But they are directlyuseful. And that makes all the difference.
Problem with novel things is finding use-cases. Sometimes both the maker and the buyer has to think of them. That’s not at all easy.
There are a million Alexas idling in loneliness as we speak. :)
Google Glass was a fantastic technological leap. But you really had to think hard about finding use-cases. This also applies to our company ImageTranslate, a technology that magically translates images from language to another. Sure everyone we pitch it to is wowed by what it can do. But it isn’t always clear what you will use it for. The use-cases certainly exist, but they aren’t visible in plain sight.
Too often, tremendous business value actually lies in what people are already familiar with. The somewhat boring stuff. Insurance (Coverfox), taxes(ClearTax), shopping(Flipkart et al) etc.
But each of these companies used technology to great advantage in disrupting boring spaces. That’s what matters.
Next time you’re onto building something novel, ask yourself twice what people might use it for. If you’re building something familiar, ask yourself how you can do it better than others.
This is not to say we shouldn’t be building new things. We should. But we will need to wait till market matures to accept the new thing. And more importantly, survive the wait.