mabinda.com Business, Education, Technology Commentary.

One of the attributes of great entrepreneurs is to see opportunities whereas others only see darkness. To spot light where others only see darkness. That is to be the first in the market. This is both a good and a bad thing. A good thing that you will reap all the profits before the copycats and imitators come in. Bad because sometimes, the market may not know what your product is all about. Whereas most people assume that the entrepreneur’s only work is to fill a gap in the market, sometimes, they have to educate the market on that which they even didn’t know that a problem needed to be solved. And that can take time and money. For instance, Google wasn’t even the first search engine. There was alta vista and yahoo before it. At the time, Google was only an idea on a Stanford university website, and was hosted on a Stanford subdomain. Whereas the other search engines just kept on listing websites as they grew, Google came up with a wonderful idea from the citation world, that is a paper that was cited the most was the most authoritative one. And so in the same way, a website that is linked to most meant it was the most authoritative one. And that’s how Google began to build its multi billion dollar empire. It’s probably why Google is so successful in the search engine business because it has learnt from the early mistakes of the pioneer search engines.

But then, being the first in the industry is also a blessing. The business model of Microsoft could be summed up as simply wanting to replace the typewriter in the office. Bill Gates had read an article on wired magazine and he simply wanted every desk in the world to have a computer, and for that computer to be run by windows operating system. Bill Gates sold this idea to IBM and ended up charging IBM royalty fees rather than a one off payment. That’s how Microsoft became so wildly successful and has a 90 percent market share in the operating system market, something that even Linux could not dislodge it from.

Or think of Uber and Airbnb. Uber pioneered ride sharing, and to this day, there are a hell lot ride sharing copycats such as Lyft or bolt but it still is the company that reaped all the early profits, or in this case, market share. The competition for Uber isn’t Lyft or bolt but rather, the taxi industry. Even though Uber has warned it’s investors that it may never make a profit, because it keeps it’s rides so artificially cheap, it still has a strong case to make that it will be a profitable company in the near future. For instance, it could try Uber eats, or even enter the car billboard ads industry. They say there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come, and business ideas are profoundly powerful. If at the right place, in this case the right market, a business idea could fetch fortunes before copy cats and imitators come onto the market. It is for this reason why an entrepreneur should always be spotting gaps in the market, or even invent a whole new industry.