How to survive a Competitive Market: Create A Blue Ocean Market From A Red Ocean Niche.
The terms Red and Blue Oceans were introduced by two business professors from France.
Like everybody else, I wanted to own my time, call the shots and not work for a company and report to a boss. So when I started venturing into business, I didn’t have a clue.
I’m a scientist. A chemist, to be specific. I worked with Department of Defense (DOD) funded projects, start-ups biotechnology companies, that well, never materialized.
So I went to venture on the business side of life, scaling a business so I won’t work for somebody else. I’m still a chemist by the way, working on projects I can’t divulge to the public. But while I am doing chemistry, I am trying to scale a business. It is in scaling up a business where I first encountered the red/blue ocean terms.
As a side note, one of the best advice in starting up a business is to keep your day job while you try to scale up your business. Michael Mathewson advice that a business idea is just an idea until tested in the market. So keep your day job first.
Options, Stocks and Forex were my first rodeos in terms of trying to work in my pajama. Some lost money, some broke even, some gain, but wasn’t really enough to support a family.
I went to venture on eBay but didn’t work either.
Amazon PL (private label) was promising. I went into selling my own private label products but realized later, the returns were razor thin. I know some people doing Amazon PL that can churn profits of 60% returns but mine was less than 10%, and sometimes, just plain losing money from advertising to Amazon’s ad platform.
But one thing that I realized is that the front end research that I made when I was doing Amazon PL was not enough. I jumped to a very bloody red ocean. If you are a big corporation and can burn money before gaining profits, jumping to a red ocean is fine. You just need a long runway before the profits shows up.
But I don’t have a deep pocket when I launched my first product. So I need to be smart in jumping to oceans. Researching is the key.
Currently, I am using sales funnel in my business, and can hook customer from a red ocean to a blue ocean that I made.
This is the secret sauce if you want to acquire customer and survive the on-line business game: Make a blue ocean from a red ocean.
