From Zero to a Million: The Day I Discovered My Unfair Advantage
I was talking to an RBC executive last week during #FintechTo in Toronto. He asked me what was Hardbacon’s advantage to solve a problem I had identified in an industry capable of spending billions developing new products. My initial reply, to be honest, wasn’t very convincing. I told him that Hardbacon could move more much more quickly than the large banks, in which innovation tends to be stifled by processes and internal politics.
He wasn’t very convinced. While he acknowledged that the banks are not very agile, he strongly asserted that they were all trying to develop innovative programs internally.
The executive’s question, I now realize, could have been formulated like this: “What is Hardbacon’s unfair advantage?” This is a question that all entrepreneurs must be able to answer satisfactorily; otherwise their project is doomed from the beginning.
Identifying a problem and finding a solution to this problem is far from being enough to ensure a start-up’s success. In fact, when you start digging, you end up finding direct or indirect competitors pretty much everywhere. I myself discovered many initiatives addressing the fact that ordinary people don’t have the same access to the financial system as the wealthy.
I discovered two organizations providing discount broker comparators in Canada, Surviscor and Sparx Trading. Not to mention all the blogs like Canadian Couch Potato and MoneyGeek, whose mission is to help people invest their money themselves.
Hardbacon is different (and I dare hope better), but when doing business on the web, being different (or better) isn’t enough. You have to be able to outshine the competition; in other words — you must have a unfair advantage. This unfair advantage is often a result of technology, capital or intellectual property, but there are no hard and fast rules. The main thing is to have an advantage impossible to imitate. In other words, your unfair advantage may not be a good idea, a highly successful advertising channel, or good knowledge of the industry, even though you need such advantages to succeed.
I’ve contemplated this subject a lot over the past few weeks, not without some apprehension: the fear of not having any such advantage. However, I think I’ve found my unfair advantage; it’s my ability to tell stories. It may sound stupid, but a business does not gain such an advantage simply by hiring an advertising firm or a writer.
In fact, most companies tend to censor the content produced by its writers, as passionate as they are about the company’s mission (I’m joking; they rarely are). In fact, businesses have no choice but to ensure said content does not trouble its partners and that it does not put the business in a vulnerable light. In Hardbacon’s case, we don’t have this constraint, since we believe that all truth is good to say, and this transparency is our trademark; no more, no less. In an industry as opaque as financial services, I think that it is in itself a unfair advantage.
We will continue to focus disproportionally on the stories, which doesn’t mean that Hardbacon isn’t a technology company. On the contrary, we will also focus more and more on the technology, but it will serve to increase our unfair advantage. For example, by providing visualizations of stock portfolios, we could transform boring figures into stories easily understood by everyone.
So what is YOUR unfair advantage?
Major Accomplishments:
- Transferred hardbacon.ca to the Microsoft Azure servers
- Met with 5 current and potential partners in Toronto
- Filed Hardbacon’s bid to be part of the MaRS Discovery District
Growth Metrics:
- Revenue: $0
- New Newsletter subscribers: 136 (total: 1764, weekly growth: 8%)
- New Snapchat subscribers: 10 (total 103, weekly growth: 11%)
- New Instagram subscribers: 31 (total: 343, weekly growth: 10%)
- New Facebook Likes: 98 (total: 1485, weekly growth: 7%)
My previous “From Zero to a Million” posts, in which I reveal every week how I’m building and growing Hardbacon with no money :
Week 8 : From Zero to a Million: Do You Really Want to Become a CEO?
Week 7: Those Darned Business Plans!
Week 6: Launching a Product Before Being Ready
Week 5: Why A Shortage of Time and Money is a Fucking Competitive Advantage
Week 4: The Danger of Getting Lost in the Crazy Parallel Universe of Startups
Week 3: When we tell the fucking truth, something magical happens
Week 2: Building an Organization Rather than an App
Week 1: Why I Launched My Startup At the Worst Possible Time
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