Here’s a Cinderella story you might like and even profit from:
A guy named Yank Dean (yes, real name) started a new company called Hummingbird.
Hummingbird sold an innovative product — a sonar-based fish finder for recreational fisherman. Previously, such fish finders were only available to commercial fishermen.
Quickly, sales shot up to $6 million a year.
Dean estimated the market for his product was $50 million a year. But Hummingbird couldn’t get past that $6 mil limit.
They interviewed and observed customers. They came up with nine new, better variations of the fish finder. The spent time and money on marketing.
And sales still wouldn’t budge. This drove the company close to bankruptcy.
And then one day, a woman working for Hummingbird, Sue Symon, was hanging out at a Bass Pro Shop. She saw another woman reaching for Hummingbird’s fish finder.
“Excuse me,” Symon asked, “what are you buying?”
The other woman replied:
“I don’t care. My husband takes me and the kids out on the boat on the weekends and it’s boring as hell. The kids go crazy. I thought maybe one of these would at least keep them entertained.”
Symon went back to her fish finder overlords and suggested that maybe they are in the wrong business. They thought they were in the fish-finding business. Maybe they are in the entertaining-kids-and-wives business.
The fish finder execs were convinced to give it a go. After all, the company was all but bankrupt.
So they stripped out lots of features from their product. They made it easier and more fun to use. They started selling where kids and wives might see it.
Result:
The first year after the change, Hummingbird went from selling $6 million of its sonar fish finder to selling $75 million of its wife and kid entertainment stations. At the peak, they sold $120 million in a year.
The end.
Nice story, right?
One of those inspirational and yet useless business case studies.
The conclusion to such case studies is usually one of:
Think outside the box…
You might not be in the business you think you’re in…
Give a man a fish, you feed yourself for a day… teach him how to keep his kids from screaming and his wife from nagging, and you feed yourself for a lifetime.
But how do you possibly recreate something like the Hummingbird story in your own business?
I don’t know. But I know somebody who might know.
His name is Merrick Furst. Once upon a time, he was the dean of the computer science school at Carnegie Mellon. Now he is the Director of the Center for Deliberate Innovation at Georgia Tech.
Basically, using his large brain and his mathematical and CS skills, Furst tries to answer such questions as, “Is this a good idea? And if not, could it be a good idea somewhere else? And if not, what might be a better idea? And how can we systematize this?”
Here’s why I’m telling you this:
Along with a few other smart, oversuccessful people, Furst has written a new book. That’s where I got the story above.
I haven’t read more of this book yet except this story (the book was published 3 days ago).
But if you’re in business… if you create innovative offers… if you want to maximize your chances of making something like $120 million with a change of approach that might be systematizeable… then the following book might be worth a read: