Do I have a disruptive technology?

Innovator’s Dilemma has made it to the top of several reading lists for business, strategy, and technology management.  When we were first pitching Bimotics, there were several potential investors that swore we needed to read it as we were challenged to further simplify the definition of our minimum viable product.  Their point was that when defining a product for the mainstream, the market is so underserved that even the simplest products could be useful.  We believe that our true value will be the integrated analytics that is when you can take data from multiple applications and blend them to get more meaningful metrics.  These advisers/investors said that just being able to demonstrate ease of use from one application was sufficient.  At first I didn’t get it.  

When it comes to analytics for small business, the market is not only underserved in getting affordable solutions, but also finding intuitive and user friendly applications.  I have heard complaints from several small business owners and have observed myself that Quickbooks was not exactly easy to use and getting reports out of it is not straightforward at all.  I ended up resorted to Quickbooks for Dummies, but finally paid someone to help me.  In the end, Bimotics has an initial product at the time of market entry that does bring immediate value in that we pre-build the analytics for our customers. I’m looking forward to proving that our simple and customer centric service can be a disruptive technology.

According to the Innovator’s Dilemma, if the trend continues for workers and users to demand applications that are also easy to use, Bimotics could potentially disrupt the business intelligence industry as a whole.  At this time, our best market for this technology is the the small business- a market that the large business intelligence providers cannot address because their existing infrastructure, build process, expertise and demand for growth.  I often meet skeptics that believe that small businesses make horrible customers and thus an unviable market.  But the case studies in this book points out that startups that first address these underserved markets not only have a safe point of market entry but also develop solutions that more lucrative customers will eventually demand.