For Entrepreneurs, Blown Deadlines Can Crush Big Ideas Time to go-to-market needs to be accorded if not more then, at least the same degree of importance in business strategy design and implementation

Imagine how in the Indian personal vehicle (PV) car markets, dominant OEMs who either have been able to or not been able to leverage the burgeoning EV market and the reasons thereof. For instance, at least two Indian auto majors, one with major market share and the other with an existing EV division, missed out when the opportunity really came to make and sell EVs. Meanwhile a third OEM with no real background in EVs launched first and raced to become the market leader in EVs.

Imagine how a path breaking small car riding upon no less than an astounding 37 technology patents and 31 design patents, hailed globally and launched in India by an Indian company, lost out. This was solely due to political unrest and grandstanding in one of the states of India, which disrupted the go-to-market strategy and eventual launch of this new-to-the-world kind of small car. The externalities on which the company had little control, arguably led to a quicker than normal demise of the car.

The window of opportunity – which this company had successfully identified and was the first to come up with a custom designed value proposition – closed. The custom built plant had to be shut down and the delivery schedule for the already booked cars was blown to smithereens. Funnily, many so-called and daresay armchair analysts tagged this post facto as a product failure based upon a wrong positioning of 'cheap car'.

This is funny, because on launch – when nobody had really seen the new car or driven it – the company had garnered 2.03 lakh (203000) fully paid bookings amounting to nearly INR 2,500 crore, within a period of one month. The car's website recorded an unprecedented 30 million hits from the date of launch of the car to the closure of the booking period, i.e. nearly 1 million hits a day. About 1.4 million people physically visited the company stores to catch a glimpse of the car. This surely could not be considered the death of an ailing product, as this was clearly a murder…!

The car had successfully created a wave but alas which it could not ride. The production disruption meant inordinate delays in deliveries, which anyone in a competitive market would know as a death-knell for any brand as the customer today does not wait. Thus, an externality driven closure of the 'window-of-opportunity' was responsible for the demise of this product.

In exploring and designing business strategy there is a crucial implication of what is termed as the 'window-of-opportunity', which refers to the optimal time to enter into an emerging industry or market.

For instance in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Tech, 2022, technologies like Open Telemetry; Causal AI; Cloud Sustainability; are categorized currently as 'innovation triggers', implying that these are slated to be the new drivers of tech based innovations. However, all of these techs are seen as being viable for only within the next two-five years. Implying that if a product or value-proposition is being planned to be created on any of these technologies, the creators only have a window of two-five years to launch, beyond which the business idea may not remain viable.

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn had very succinctly articulated: "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." What he meant was how in yesteryears' brick-and-mortar businesses, you could ring-fence business/revenue models – based on huge initial investment in plant, machinery and processes – creating high entry barriers for potential competition. However, in today's asset light and community/platform based business models, it is speed that is paramount for scaling up fast or someone else nimbler than you will take away your market.

Research reiterates how in new markets the evolution of new categories of products/services need to be seen as being made up of two consecutive halves. There is an initial phase of divergence wherein an increasing number of categories are introduced and used, which is then followed by a phase of convergence, wherein a few categories gain in acceptance while many others gradually lose out. Dominant categories evolve which leads to a relatively stable standards or dominant product designs. The window of opportunity clearly exists within the two stages bookended by firstly - the emergence of a dominant category and secondly - the precipitation to a dominant (stable) design.

In the era of global and open competition, if the first version of your product is caught up in interminable tests, assessments, re-evaluations and refining, it may lose out to faster go-to-market brands who successfully create a beachhead before you could, even if with more basic value propositions with less features. Because, once a dominant design phase has been manifested and accepted by different stakeholders, it will become that much more difficult to enter into that market and create notable market share or recognition, unless and until one breaks the mould and comes up again with a new category.

Time to go-to-market therefore needs to be accorded if not more then, at least the same degree of importance in business strategy design and implementation. This is irrespective of the size of business. Thus, entrepreneurship which makes mistakes and pivots fast is a surer path to success than may be one where we keep trying to build too many (and too divergent) functionalities in our value propositions and get delayed, missing the proverbial window-of-opportunity.