Why Enterprises Aren’t The Quickest Path to Success
Bluzelle’s early adopters are dApp developers
Our first customers and supporters need to be fast and ready to grow the community.
A common question asked to us is “When do you think Bluzelle will be used by large enterprises”? This isn’t surprising as it’s known we have worked with large enterprises like HSBC, AIA and MUFG before. Getting a large enterprise is a big win because they will remain a customer for a long time as switching technologies for a large company can be long and expensive. But this is why we don’t want to target them for now. So who are we going after first and why?
The Technology Adoption Curve
Let’s begin with the technology adoption curve.
Early Adopters — dApp Developers
For Bluzelle, we are currently in the early adopter phase, and our early adopters are dApp developers (decentralized applications). dApp developers are well versed in blockchain and are open to using new products like Bluzelle to meet their needs. At a high level they may seem like a small group, but this group is highly influential and will be the leaders and evangelists for Bluzelle. Through them we’ll be able to lower our cost to get new customers as they will be able to spread the word and refer us to others.
Early Majority — General Developers
After getting high market share of dApp developers, we see the early majority adopting Bluzelle. For us the early majority are small to mid-size companies that having nothing to do with Blockchain. These could be companies building mobile games, calendar apps, newsletter service and anything else. They key is they found out about Bluzelle, saw all the dApps using us and then felt comfortable to switch from their cloud and centralized database systems to Bluzelle.
Late Majority — Enterprises
Enterprises fit into the Late Majority phase and we target them last. Enterprises are slow just because of their size. To get approval for anything new they have to go through several layers of managers. This takes a lot of time that a company like us isn’t willing to wait. There are people at their companies now who would love to use blockchain based solutions, but are they willing to risk their job on a new tech by a new company? The old enterprise adage is “No one ever got fired for hiring Microsoft or IBM”.
If we naturally follow the adoption curve above then by the time we decide to aggressively go after enterprises we will have achieved high adoption from the first two groups. The manager at an enterprise has the validation and credibility they need to recommend their company to switch to Bluzelle. This shortens the sales cycle, leading to faster revenues for our network.
Case Study — Slack
As an example of the technology adoption curve, let’s look at Slack. I have an affinity to it because it started from Vancouver, where I am originally from.
When Slack first started the early adopters were the console and mobile gaming community. Vancouver is a hotbed for that and it was easier for Slack spread through word of mouth as developers all talk to one another. I was helping an AR (augmented reality) company then and they turned me onto Slack because they were using it.
The early majority were then startups in general who saw how effective of a tool it was. By then Slack was growing fast and raising large amounts of money — the VC premise being “look how well it’s doing now, wait until enterprises adopt it.” It was after the late majority of of enterprises came including Autodesk, LVMH and Ticketmaster.
The strategy is tried and tested well. The key is patience and building each community step by step. If you start with the enterprises, you can spend a long time selling in and hoping to get the big win - but that one enterprise is not a community. And in doing so you will have missed out on all the smaller wins that will vocalize and build the community for you.
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