I sat with the CEO of this venture for a few hours and listened to him talking about his amazing new technology which he developed himself for the last 9 years. The technology is capable of transforming unstructured text into structured data and is fully automatic with very interesting results.
I agreed that it is really cool technology but I said that we need to see if it can be turned into a product. He looked at me and said that it is already a product. I told him that a product has a clear definition targeted to solve a specific need in a specific buying scenario of a specific customer and the money from it comes from a specific budget.
His response was that because there are competing companies and his technology is better-there must be a need and a customer and a budget.
I reviewed with him his competitive landscape and we understood that they are not just selling the technology but a full solution including the needed services and deliver results in a way that he could not do with software only.
He understood that if he walked to the customers and offered his superior technology they would not know what to do with it.
The question was how we can define his product in a way that it can be sold and to who by leveraging what he already has and not require him to compete directly with the other companies that had thousands of employees and a much larger budget.
I came up with an idea of how we can turn his technology into a sellable black box service and a new category name for what he is offering that would make sense to customers as they hear it for the first time as it uses terms they know but applied in a creative way.
He loved the idea and was eager to implement it immediately in his presentations and other marketing documentation.
I held an advisory board role with the company for a while and assisted with referral to several potential large customers and beta sites.
It was a fun assignment because sometimes when you come up with a new and innovative new approach and it clicks immediately with all involved everything else just flows from it and becomes obvious.
