Up until just a few years ago, the barrier to a successful entry in business used to be ' just do it' - meaning, take an idea - almost any idea, and if you were committed to bring it to market, you had a pretty good chance at success.
Then came the iPhone-app revolution. While initially understood as the promise for people to liberate themselves from the corporate slavery that was gratuitously shattered during the most recent recession, it has turned out to be much more than that.
There are currently upwards of 565,000 start-ups per month aimlessly roaming the streets of high-tech valley, hoping for that token VC hand-out and with it a shot at software stardom. We now also have 2.5 million apps between Apple and Google. Let me repeat in case you missed it in the first sentence: 2.5 MILLION mobile apps and 6 MILLION start-ups per year. Let that sink in and you might come to the conclusion that trying to build the next cool app is about as smart an idea as playing dead in the streets of Pamplona during the running of the bulls.
While the masses have feverishly plucked the last of the low hanging fruit from the idea tree it is also true that getting into the app-store as it turns out, is not the Golden Ticket after all. As a matter of fact, the massive registrant volume has reduced it from the launch pad of dreams to little more than a yellow page entry.
Has the American Dream all but come to a screeching halt … commoditized and soon to be over-run by the under-current of the developing world that understands nothing but the latest in technology and has no barriers to entry? Whoever thought that Technology would be able to pin imagination into a corner.
Now what?
Fortunately, the short answer is simpler than you might think. Perhaps it is still more about Golden Rules than Golden Tickets. One that I recall fondly from the early days as an entrepreneur is that you “don’t do what everyone else does.” It is blanked wisdom that encapsulates the problem of competitive behavior and the realization that genius desires risk, uncertainty, not mass momentum.
Rise above the fast-food’esque start-up feeding frenzy and do things that the masses can’t or perhaps don’t want to easily replicate. Create systems that organize and make sense of the impending tidal wave of exponential technologies. Think deep. Find some new secrets. There are fewer, but still plenty.
Read more about Service Tracking Systems here.
