I listened to a great interview on Mixergy with a serial Entrepreneur, Paul Berberian. Paul is on his 7th company – Orbotix (you need to check out Sphero – I have 3, one for me and one for each of my daughters).
Anyway, the main point of the interview was about how one of his earlier businesses went through a whole series of iterations. Each were drastic changes and allowed the company to live another day and then eventually sell for over $100,000,000.
First they tried to become a better TV Ratings system to compete with Nielson. Next they tried doing closed caption creation which then lead to Video Streaming over the internet. This is where they first started getting revenue distributing training content for companies. Finally they iterated to doing conference calls over the web. This is the company that was sold. Believe it or not each business built on the work done at previous steps. When you hear Paul describe it, it actually makes sense.
As Nemo would say “Just keep swimming”. If you keep listening to what the customer wants, you never know what might happen.
Engineered-Success 