Learning from an example of how one startup failed
Ecomom was a small startup internet retail company selling earth friendly mom and maternity products including food, toys, apparel, and other baby related items. With headquarters in Las Vegas and San Francisco and a third-party fulfillment in Los Angeles, any volume could be shipped within 24 hours. Founded in 2007, by 2011 it had turnover of just over $1 million, but a further round of investment of $12 million required further growth, but at what cost?
Business Insider describes the story of the eventual failure of the company in 2013 With hindsight it's difficult to understand investment in the company, but perhaps this was buoyed by the success story of Tony Hsieh building Las Vegas-based Zappos into an online shoe and retail business that Amazon acquired for $1.2 billion. Of course, investors, require growth and Ecomum did achieve revenues of nearly $4 million in…
5 ways of encouraging Disruptive Innovation
Disruptive innovation is no longer the exception, it’s becoming the rule as category incumbents are swept aside by new entrants. Just look at Blackberry, Blockbuster, Borders, Kodak and even Polaroid – all erstwhile “innovative” companies that somehow missed opportunities to leapfrog to the next big thing in subsequent innovation that is often digitally fuelled.
Memorex can be added to this infamous listing, once darling of the US stock market, when its innovative pipeline under a new CEO ran dry in a most spectacular way embarrassing its entire board.
This is by no way an isolated example. If we’re not proactively driving disruption in a systemic manner, we’ll eventually need to react to it or confront reality. Most Leaders however, aren’t prepared for the challenges of leading through such prolonged periods of uncertainty and the often accompanying…
How to prosper in a world of Digital Disruption
It’s become fashionable in business/ technology circles to talk about ‘disruption’. As a ‘good’ thing. Not like a broken-down train on the London Underground which causes chaos in the evening ‘Rush Hour’, or the alarming and possibly dangerous cracks in the structure of the M4 which shut down the main motorway from Heathrow Airport just weeks before the London Olympic Games, nor even the biblical scale flooding that turns Silverstone Motor Racing circuit into a sea…
Google revenue model case study
Google case study : A summary of Google business strategy and background on Google technology for readers of my Digital Marketing and E-commerce books. End of case contains technical references on Google's approach to crawling, indexing and ranking results at the end of this case study page.
This Google strategy case study is updated for each new edition of my Digital marketing or E-business book.
Google mission
Google’s mission is encapsulated in the SEC filing statement:
“to organize the world’s information …. and make it universally accessible and useful”.
Google explains that it believes that the most effective, and ultimately the most profitable, way to accomplish our mission is to put the needs of our users first. Offering a high-quality user experience has led to strong word-of-mouth promotion and strong traffic growth.
Read further details on the culture and ethics of Google in their Ten Things Manifesto. Notable tenets of…
An eBay Business Strategy case study
A 2010 update on eBay
Increased use of mobile Ecommerce. The eBay mobile app for iPhone was downloaded seven million times by January 2010. Consumers are shopping more and more via their mobile phones with more than $600 million worth of sales transacted through mobile applications in 2009.
eBay's Growth strategy. According to the SEC filing "Our growth strategy is focused on reinvesting in our customers by improving the buyer experience and seller economics by enhancing our products and services, improving trust and safety and customer support,
extending our product offerings into new formats, categories and geographies, and implementing innovative pricing and buyer retention strategies. Over the course of 2009, we continued to make significant changes that were designed to improve the user experience on all of our sites, including changes to pricing and shipping policies. In 2009, we also made significant steps to create a faster and…
