On Not Forgetting to be 10x Better

I was struggling what to make of the news that now, AT&T too was jumping into the cloud storage-as-a-commodity business offering 5GB of free online storage.  Just like DropBox.  And Google Drive.  And Box, if you use it that way.  And iCloud.  And SkyDrive.  And.  And.  And.

You could make fun of it, but it does make sense.  Their phones are cluttered with apps solving a missing problem with mobile devices — cloud storage.  Why not be in the “business” themselves?  Probably won’t work, but — worth a short.

For a big company.  That already has hundreds of millions of customers.

What it is, is a good reminder of is the basic 10x rule.  Your start-up has to be 10x better than anything else out there, or no one will ever pay for it.

It’s even more true in SaaS.  The existing competition may be, in your opinion, flawed.  But it’s not enough to just be better in SaaS.  Because SaaS involves business process change and change management.  So just getting to the table of consideration is even harder.  Making a business process change is a big deal.  So if you aren’t 10x better, and clearly, plainly, 10x better than the entrenched competition — you won’t even be considered in SaaS.  

Order of Magnitude image from here.