Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 300 | Entrepreneurship Section | 2

Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Week 300 | June 9-15, 2023.

Build It Like Bezos: Why Your Tech Startup Should Think Big and Act Small

By Joe Procopio | Inc Magazine | June 13, 2023

Listen to the Extractive Summary of the Article

Jeff Bezos did not set out to become the king of home-delivered paperback books. But we’re at a point in history when an entire generation knows Amazon only as the dominant player in e-commerce, and doesn’t remember the time when Amazon was that scrappy little startup that pioneered the shipping of words-on-paper to your door.  Today, when you think of Amazon, you think of it as the place to get everything you need — right now. But it wasn’t always this way. At one point, Bezos had his mind fully focused on books. Everything that came later was the result of a startup strategy of thinking big and acting small.  The author use three examples to show how this could work.

1. From Books to Those Little Creamer Cups.  According to the author when he sat down to write this article, he had just ordered coffee pods and those little creamer cups (an indulgence) on Prime, and they arrived at his door less than 90 minutes later — before he finished his first draft.   According to him, he can picture Jeff, circa 1994, thinking, “Joe is writing. He needs his coffee. Not in five days or even two days. He needs it now. That’s how I’m going to make him and everyone else a customer for life. It’s worth the extra spend to make it happen.”  It most definitely cost Amazon more money to fulfill his order than he paid, and it’s not a mistake, and it’s not random loss leadership. The author ordered golf gloves too (Amazon does everything) and those won’t be here until tomorrow. But the coffee and the creamer got here right now. And to think big and act big, Amazon first had to act small. Then perfect everything.
2. Washing Cars to Mobile Auto Repair.  In 2017, Spiffy – a mobile car wash and detail company the author co-founded – had a couple of dozen vans and maybe 50 mobile-wash technicians, offering service in four cities. But according to the author, we were collecting data, perfecting the process, building out our own vans and software. We were using some of the same strategies Amazon used when they were selling books — thinking big, acting small, and perfecting the process.   In 2018, they started offering oil changes, then they started working with fleets, and then they added on tires, brakes, and other light repairs. Today, they are no longer mobile car wash, they are “mobile vehicle care and maintenance,” in 50 cities, with 500 techs, and always hiring.
3. Startup Education and Advisement Sucks.  According to the author over 20 years ago, he started advising other founders, because the path he had to walk was difficult and risky and stressful and the education and advice he had received were awful. Soon, he was being offered obscene amounts of money to advise growth-stage and late-stage startups. He was still advising early-stagers, who were mostly broke, and still writing articles like these to put out as much free, real, tactical startup advice and education as he could.   Then his free time started drying up, and the opportunity cost of doing “free and cheap” started to compound. It occurred to him that there was a huge space between free advice, which helps a lot of people a little bit, and super-expensive paid advice, which helps a couple of people quite a lot.   So he founded Teaching Startup to bridge that gap, recruiting experienced entrepreneurs to answer questions from other entrepreneurs (experienced or not), via email. He literally started the whole thing on Mailchimp, using that platform as the product, the CRM, the subscription model–everything but the credit card swipe for the paltry $10 a month he was asking.   And then it blew up, in a good way.  He was told to go edtech, to use video consultations, to do seminars and webinars, to write books. In other words, to act big now that he was thinking big. But three years in, he is still perfecting the process. 

2 key takeaways from the article

1. Jeff Bezos did not set out to become the king of home-delivered paperback books. But we’re at a point in history when an entire generation knows Amazon only as the dominant player in e-commerce, and doesn’t remember the time when Amazon was that scrappy little startup that pioneered the shipping of words-on-paper to your door.  
2. Today, when you think of Amazon, you think of it as the place to get everything you need — right now. But it wasn’t always this way. At one point, Bezos had his mind fully focused on books. Everything that came later was the result of a startup strategy of thinking big, acting small, and perfecting the process.

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Topics:  Entrepreneurship, Startup, Business Model, Strategy