Business opportunities

(Image is AI generated, text is all mine)

I once suggested to a former boss that we show this clip during a staff meeting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o. It has strong dramaturgy and drives home the simple but essential point that you need customers to run a business.

But there’s also a silver lining to the clip that I find more interesting. Mr. Jobs points out that while “you might be able to build a small commercial app” (off of OpenDoc), Apple needs a cohesive strategy to sell “8–10 billion dollars of product” (which is now nearly 400 billion dollars annually). And in that context, OpenDoc simply didn’t fit.

To me, that’s a business opportunity! The advantage to building tech commercially without the risk of Big Tech stealing your market is huge! I'm not talking about OpenDoc specifically (I don’t know much about it), but I probably know dozens of similar examples. Systems, standards, or pieces of tech that some customers would absolutely want to use, but that are too peripheral for Big Tech to integrate into their business strategies.

I ran a company called TDialog, which built a secure messaging software product. What made us unusual was that we sold a software license rather than a managed service. Old-fashioned you might say, but it turns out that many customers actually want to host their own security software, and even more so nowadays.

All we needed was a small but sufficient number of customers who wanted self-hosted secure messaging. In that niche, we had no competition! Other factors, like integrations with Swedish public sector systems capped our growth potential internationally but also made it hard for a larger player to compete.

In 2020, TDialog sold around 400,000 USD worth of product - roughly one millionth of Apple’s 2024 revenue. So a million TDialogs would equal one Apple. That was fantastic: I made and make a great living from TDialog — both from our sales and later when I sold the company.

Given that TDialog was about a millionth the size of Apple, how much of Apple’s tech and business strategy would apply to us? Not much, I would say. The similarities are mostly the obvious things. For example, I don’t need Steve Jobs to tell me a company needs customers — that’s just basic economics. But much of what’s true for large enterprises simply doesn’t apply to small businesses. Take, for instance, the case for investing heavily in tech infrastructure. Imagine how much money was saved at startup by TDialog not having to create a service infrastructure online, since we sold on-premises software!

I’d argue that the vast majority of people in tech — engineers, managers, and founders alike — are being inspired, coached, and taught by Big Tech, directly or indirectly (because their mentors and teachers are all marinated in that same mass-produced ChatGPT-supported narrative). Regardless of whether those insights apply to smaller companies, it has become both a culture and a default approach to doing business in the tech sector.

And that means the risk of you overlooking the golden nuggets that exist specifically in your business, in your tech — the things that make you difficult to replace by, say, an American Big Tech company.

I think of it like this: a handful of dogs are herding a massive flock of sheep across a green meadow. The spots the dogs lead them to may once have been the best spots, but now they’re brown, eaten down, and trampled. Meanwhile, the pristine patches of grass lie just a hop skip and jump away. And those, my friends, are the business opportunities for small tech enterprises.