Technology
Evolving technologies have been empowering consumers in the 21st century. Gone are the days when people were okay to wait in long queues for getting a product/service. Today, we have AI-driven assistants to follow voice commands, chatbots to offer customer services, AR-powered navigation tools on smartphones, and SaaS platforms to access data from any device.
A study by Forbes has reported that 81% of organizations view customer experience as an important differentiator. That’s why many businesses and IT startups are utilizing advanced technologies to create products and services to fulfill the constant demand. Most of them rely on the lean startup approach amongst many other business methodologies while establishing their businesses. They count on offering high-quality information technology solutions to reshape their respective businesses.
Creating technology-based startups
Decades ago, many businesses generally showed reluctance to embrace new technology. It was easier for them to stick to traditional tools and techniques that they were aware of. However, things are slowly changing today. Small businesses and startups are leading the way to accept new technologies as these help in revolutionizing the future.
Most IT startups offer products and services using new business models and thought processes. For instance, industry analysts have been predicting the increase of the DevOps market from USD 2.90 Billion in 2017 to USD 10.31 Billion in 2023, at a CAGR of 24.7%. Many startups, like CTO.ai and ShuttleOps, have recognized this demand and are offering quality DevOps solutions.
As AI is the next best thing in technology, some startups are also developing AI-powered products. Dataiku, eightfold.ai, and Mobvoi are some successful AI-based companies, which have even received the coveted ‘unicorn’ status.
Traditional industries are open to new technologies
The manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, and construction industries are some of the slowest to adopt new technologies. They were sticking to traditional business models and were lagging when the digital revolution happened. But today, entrepreneurs are willing to explore these industries and make use of cutting-edge technology solutions to streamline processes and save time, cost, and energy.
A Swiss-based startup, Flyability, has introduced collision-safe drones which provide maintenance services in hard-to-access areas, thereby reducing the need for shutting down plants. CIPO Cloud, another construction tech startup, offers a cloud platform to track and manage different building projects and programs. AI is also being utilized for managing many supply chain and logistics-based organizations.
Adapting to changing business models
Due to technology advancement, many business models are becoming obsolete, no matter how successful they used to be. The music industry, for instance, saw the rise and fall of cassettes and other physically distributed music. Today, digital music has taken over MP3 file formats. Tomorrow, another technology could make digital music a thing of the past.
Startups are making use of innovative ideas to create unique business models to attract more customers. This is possible when the core team can brainstorm ideas, understand market trends and know exactly what their target audience is looking for. Some successful business models adopted by startups are data-driven, like technology consulting services, and platform-based, like those offering mobile solutions. One of the best examples of a unique business model would be the one used by Airbnb.
In 2017, Airbnb had 4 million listings across 191 countries, which was more than the listings of the top 5 hotel brands combined! In 2020, the listings have increased to 7 million. How did they achieve this feat? Their platform was built on a unique idea and they focussed on customer engagement and user experience.
Final thoughts
To achieve success, new businesses need to understand changing market trends and customer requirements to develop a product/service. They must also strive to develop a game-changing technology to penetrate the market of their interest. Many startups have catapulted to success by adopting the lean startup methodology as the startup industry is highly uncertain and the collated data can be used to test hypotheses. The key is to either come up with a unique idea to positively disrupt existing platforms or to use an existing idea and build something unique around it.
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