{"id":393,"date":"2011-08-05T12:06:17","date_gmt":"2011-08-05T16:06:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/?p=393"},"modified":"2011-08-05T12:06:17","modified_gmt":"2011-08-05T16:06:17","slug":"393","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/393\/","title":{"rendered":"Lottery Avoidance:  Domain Expertise"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Continuing my ad-hoc series on avoiding the entrepreneurial lottery for pure software Internet\/mobile projects: \u00a0another &#8220;unfair advantage&#8221; is deep domain experience around your product and market.<\/p>\n<p>In this context, this means <strong>at least<\/strong> a few years experience in the domain, not &#8220;we&#8217;ve spent the past 3 months studying this market&#8221;. \u00a0It means you have:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A clear, &#8220;inside baseball&#8221; understanding of the markets, customer behaviors, dynamics and existing players<\/li>\n<li>Personal relationships with key leaders in the market (if you called their cell, would they take your call?)<\/li>\n<li>An understanding of how the Internet will disrupt the existing market or create the new opportunity<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>On the last point, there&#8217;s a balance: \u00a0I sometimes find being in a domain too long can make it hard to think disruptively.<\/p>\n<div><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"line-height: 24px;\">Without these advantages, you&#8217;re learning on the job, and you&#8217;ve got little or no advantage over the half-dozen other Internet competitors that are targeting your product\/market. \u00a0Success is possible, but the odds are more lottery-like.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Continuing my ad-hoc series on avoiding the entrepreneurial lottery for pure software Internet\/mobile projects: \u00a0another &#8220;unfair advantage&#8221; is deep domain experience around your product and market. In this context, this means at least a few years experience in the domain, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/393\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entrepreneurship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}