> What can I sell to these people and how?
I think maybe it could be summed up as “affordable turnkey solutions”.
Years ago I read where HP was offering rental digital camera/printer
packages for taking photos of weddings in rural areas of India.
A photography business could be started without requiring a lot of
capital up front. Multiply small profits from such a business by
millions of customers, and you build name recognition, trust,
goodwill, and quite a lot of long-term growth…
I also read of an American inventor who developed a molded plastic eyeglasses
solution which allowed a business person with no special skills or training
to measure eyeglass prescription and mould instant plastic eyeglasses in a
single operation. Multiply small-ticket sales of such an essential by millions
—by making eyeglasses affordable to millions of people who otherwise
couldn’t afford them, and…
Apparently a British English textbook has been adopted for use in primary
schools in China—something like a million copies, I believe. It is a
tongue-in-cheek portrait of cultural differences (British are wierdos
who eat with knife and fork rather than chopsticks, ha ha) the humor
of which appeals to primary school kids. An item like this can create
cross-cultural goodwill plus a lot of profit (a few dollars in profit
per copy, multiplied by a million). Books have a lot more good effects
on the next generation than bombs.
It also seems that companies that try to lock customers in to proprietary solutions
are losing out to companies who understand that wide adoption and continuing enhance-
ment are more important…
Compare Fujitsu’s MO drive and Sony’s MD with HP’s GP-IB : both Fujitsu and Sony
tried to keep these products proprietary rather than have them widely adopted
as defacto standards. The effect was like burying their money in the garden:
the business didn’t grow, and their inventions have essentially been obsoleted.
By way of contrast, HP put its GP-IB interface in the public domain, made a standard
of it, and—as a result—they sold a lot of measuring instruments (with GP-IB
interfaces, and superior ease of use) that they had already developed.
Like giving away the razor and selling the blades (or like the “our software
is essentially free, but you pay for support and updates” model of RedHat, etc.)
The lesson that “High Impact” and “Openness” are the most valuable factors
in “virally” developing new “markets”—creating an impact far greater than
any organization could create on its own—seems to also be the theme of the book
“Forces for Good” (about high-impact nonprofits).
