The Old Rules
In the current capitalist market, competition is easily understood, you compete for more customer, more share, more money. To the consumer competition is an intrinsic value of capitalism, businesses need to compete so that the products can be better for the customers; customers want businesses to compete for this very advantage. The U.S Government wants competition because they fear “Socialism” and Monopoly in the market. So business big and small are forced into this idea that we need to compete in order to win. We think that kind of idea of how businesses should compete in general is getting a bit stale. Just like technology, we think this idea of “competition” needs an upgrade.
Competition is necessary don’t get us wrong. But if you start to compete with everything relevant/relevant-adjacent players in the market you’ll quickly find yourself in a very bad spot. In any strategy games, if you’re playing on a board with eight other players and you’re the only player looking out for yourself, you’ll be expected to be attacked from every direction. And with limited resources, you’ll be the first to die if you think you can make it on your own. Why? Because the other players want to win as well, they won’t let you stand in the way of that.
You’ve probably heard it before when the enemy is too large, the little guys would stick together in order to beat the big guys. This idea isn’t new, but so few small businesses are doing this explicitly.
Now, coming together is more of a daunting task than one would realize.
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Local Collaboration is Hard Without Data
Maybe because finding the business that you can actually work with is a very challenging task. And if you do manage to find someone to work with, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll make more money if you’re working together with someone to do like a special advertising campaign or whatever tactics you might come up with. Indeed, collaboration is tricky business.
As a small business owner, it is hard to compete with the level of intelligence that big business has in terms of how the market is looking. Even if you own a shop in a local mall, do you know how the store across from you is doing? And if you collaborate with them will this be beneficial? Not unless you spend of couple thousand of the dollar on market research to find out.
This barrier makes it hard for business to collaborate with one another because you never know which business is the best partner. So you’ll most likely shoot a dart in the dark until you find one that will be beneficial. Basically, trying to collaborate with another is hard without data to suggest that the partnership can be beneficial.
But we plan on fixing that.
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Wali’s Tech helps the collaboration process
We want to make this collaboration process as easy and as profitable for all companies involved, that is our end-result design.
Some question that can go through your mind when you approach this process:
Imagine if you own a board game shop and want to collaborate with another company, ask yourself is collaborating with a company in the same industry help me be more profitable?
OR
collaborating with a supplemental business be more useful?
If people buy a board game from you and they get 10% off with the next door bubble tea place, would that be better than collaborating with someone in the same industry?
More question you could ask:
-You could also ask yourself which path does my audience take to get to my store and I could collaborate with another business at the beginning of that path to increase my awareness?
-What kind of collaboration? Should I go with a sale? Or a coupon giveaway?
This is a lot of thinking, and the good news is that we are working on building something that will calculate and think through these Questions for you! Wali will eventually be able to suggest which businesses you can collaborate with that has the highest impact on customer value, profitability, revenue etc. (all base on your specification.) And at the touch of a button (on the dash,) you can communicate with the business of choice and an open channel will begin to be open for both businesses to talk about collaborating with one another.
Why are we building this module into our product line? Because we think that competition and its definition needs to be upgraded. As a small business, we think that good strategic collaboration is much more valuable than being stuck in the hyper aggressive competitive mentality.
If you look for collaborators you gain valuable allies to help your business and their business both grow! Imagine a tennis racket company collaborating with a tennis ball company…That kind of synergy is what we want to do for your business.
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Product still matters
When we talk about competition, we want to stress that sometimes it is good to take a step towards collaboration. Making some friends along the way is helpful to the survivability of your small business. Rather than being hyper aggressive like those guys at the enterprise level.
You’re a small business owner, you don’t really need to worry about the noise that is associated with competition, like marketing messages, and analytics. Big enterprises have these metrics locked down and there is no way for you to even come close to their level because chances are you don’t have the infrastructure to levy against them.
But there is one thing to never let out of your mind.
The product competition is still an absolute must! Don’t ever shirk on the product that you are giving out to your customers. As a business, you will always want to compete at this level. Big or small, your business needs to prove itself why it is worthy to be in the market. Meaning that if you’re a toymaker shop and your making toys, don’t stop making the best toys out there, even if you are collaborating with another toy maker shop in the local area.
Good luck out there, and we’re rooting for you!
❤️️
All Things Wali 