Question: What has enabled the geometric growth rates of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Atlassian, and other digital unicorns?
Answer: Wide and deep feedback from the market enabling them to aggressively focus resources on areas that deliver the best returns.
Technology is only the tool that has enabled this unprecedented level of feedback, in real time. It is the feedback itself that has been the driver of growth.
It has always been so.
Finding ways to build an understanding of the drivers of superior performance has been the goal of intelligent marketers, and management more generally, forever. The experts in the pre-digital age were the direct response advertisers, who were able to determine quickly which version of a magazine or TV ad caused the phones to ring and the coupons to be redeemed. Post digital, it is those who are able to collate and analyse the response in just the same way, except it can be done in real time.
They have become the masters of absorbing market and customer feedback, then being able to evolve rapidly and continuously by leveraging that knowledge on an ongoing basis.
Amazon started off as a bookseller, the plan was never to become the master of retail. This evolved with them as they quickly noted what worked, and doubled down on it, continuously. Meanwhile, they were prepared to invest in the adjacencies that emerged, several of which, such as AWS, have become monster businesses.
That process continues, even as Jeff Bezos invests in blue sky projects like satellite internet, drone delivery, electric cars, and space vehicles.
The hardest part is building the initial momentum. Once you have it, that momentum will drive other ‘flywheels’ becoming a virtuous cycle that is almost self-perpetuating.
Header credit: Scribbled ‘Flywheel’ diagram by Jeff Bezos on a restaurant napkin in 2001. It is driven by input metrics, specifically market feedback.
