— Strategy, Entrepreneurship — 2 min read
In early 2000s, Amazon was trying to build an e-commerce-as-a-sevice for it's clients. So they try to solve a novel problem in which anyone has it's own e-commerce service. Another thing Amazon was trying to solve was dealing with unusual peak traffic patterns especially during the holiday season. So as you can guess, these points connected together and Amazon Web Service emerged.
In April 2015, Amazon.com reported AWS was profitable, with sales of $1.57 billion in the first quarter of the year and $265 million of operating income. Founder Jeff Bezos described it as a fast-growing $5 billion business; analysts described it as "surprisingly more profitable than forecast". Amazon stock surged and this giant company became unstoppable.
How this happened? It happened by chance, or there was a restrict planning?
As I mentioned in the Painting or Programming, Amazon focus on the problem. they moved toward the main thing which many businesses had problems about. And introduced a solution. If we look at the market size of the cloud service, we'd observe that the market size has been quadruple during 6 years. Estimations go beyond and determine that this market would be valued about 200 billion US dollar till the end of 2030.
This paradigm is first introduced by David Heinemeier Hansson to describe the philosophy of the Ruby on Rails web framework, but is related to earlier ideas like the concept of "sensible defaults" and the principle of least astonishment in user interface design. Think about Mac and Linux and the way they behave. The 'end-to-end' concept that Jobs believed in products relates to convention. When you reduce number of decisions people should make, it will make them build more solution-centric things at their own convenience.
This paradigm banish people from decision fatigue; a concept that lead to make poor choices with their purchases. Jonathan Levav at Stanford University designed experiments showing how decision fatigue can leave a person vulnerable to sales and marketing strategies designed to time the sale."Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people...can't resist the dealer's offer to rustproof their new car", He said.
If a product or service don't reduce problems that one may face; it reaches to dead ends. The one company that prefer convention over configuration is Netlify...
In Iran, young entrepreneurs try to solve none-existing problems. Besides, they offer some options that don't even count as options. For instance, when one cafe flourishes as the matter of revenue, it extends their menu to offer more options to its buyers. But it's not a delightful solution. think about starbucks or other profitable companies. you will find them that they focus on one problem and offer the best solution. They reduce your options. So you will reach to your need as soon as possible.
In this regard, I really respect the san francisco based startup Netlify. They focus on solving the development problem for developers. They don't reinvent wheel, and use lambda service which is provided by AWS. they are not trying to compete with AWS. In contrast, they aim to ease the development process. Some may find it unpleasant that you could not config your system. But I think that when you offer a service that need to meet some specified need, you should focus on them. You maybe find it helpful if you go to starbucks and they offer you delicious pizza, but it's not what you should expect. You will go there because you need to enjoy your moment with one coffee and sitting behind your laptop focusing on your work.