To do many things or one?
One of the most common advice we got in any VC meeting was:
“Dont do too many things. Concentrate on only one thing and execute”
Solid advice. But looks like the advice is only before investment. After investment it seems to be, “Do everything”
Take the case of Snapdeal where the founders have just this week blamed doing too many things as one of the reasons for their problems.
When we started, we wanted to do only one thing, build a cloud telephony platform and let startups build on top of it.
But an early experience with a current cloud player made us realize it was not a big enough moat or a big enough market.
So we built a cloud call center product.
But not everyone wanted a full featured call center solution and some competitors were pitching a cloud PBX solution as a cloud call center.
So we built a Cloud PBX to counter that.
Now we are moving up the stack and building speech solutions.
The justification we have been giving ourselves is that these are all related to business communication and business communication is a not a one size fits all strategy. And having multiple products in your bouquet helps you to upsell to your existing customers.
Not many have been able to pull of doing too many things at once. Maybe Zoho is an exception. But even there, among their many products only few are winners. But Zoho does not have investor pressure. So they can take it slow and let each of the products mature.
But most others who have tried doing too many things have failed. Like Snapdeal.
Another one trying this approach is Freshdesk. They started with Freshdesk, then they created Freshsales and now Freshcaller. They also have some solutions for IT management. Will have to wait to see if they succeed in this approach. But since they are VC funded, they will have investor pressure.
Or maybe the investors advised them to do too many things.
