We are all creatures of habit. We are use to doing the same things in the same way and expect the same results. The great thing about innovation is that it can teach us a new ways of doing things and lessen the number of steps required to get the same desired results. Factors such as your age, your comfort with technology and how you use technology are all contributing factors of using what today’s entrepreneurs build when it comes to new products & services in order to help solve society’s pain points. As a society, we went from records to cassette tapes to cd’s to streaming. Depending on your current age, do you remember carrying around cassette tapes and cd’s? Over time we learn to adapt to new technologies and if we are paying attention, we realize how we have to use less and less of our time & effort in order to benefit from the products and services that we use on a daily basis. Many new innovations are introduced because we understand that humans are busier and busier and anything that can be offered that can save us time and effort is usually well received and adopted.
Disruptive Innovation is a phrase used to describe introducing a new way of performing a task or tasks that will save users things such as time, money and/or effort. Many tasks performed in society have been performed the same way since the task was first introduced. Disruptive Innovation takes an existing task and modifies how it is performed and makes it a more efficient to perform. There might be a marginal increase in the benefit of the new innovation but it is usually related to saving time in completing. Some folks are not interested in doing things differently and disrupting their routine “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality. But a certain segment of the population in society welcomes change and are the first to try certain things before others. We call those individuals “Innovators” and “Early Adopters”. After those initial groups are onboard with a new process or try it out and give their feedback, we start to see other groups start to take notice. We then have the “Early Majority” followed by the “Late Majority” and then the “Laggards”. Laggards are the folks who tend to say “When hell freezes over” before they will use a new product, service or try a new way of doing things. There is typically a bell curve type technology adoption lifecycle.
If a product, service or way or doing things can be improved and it is not cost prohibitive, cumbersome or time-consuming then why not give it a try? You might just like how that new product, service or way of doing things affects your life. As a tech entrepreneur, my goal was to look closely at how a particular group of folks, small business owners, address a most solve pain point. That pain point is customer acquisition and the related costs associated with customer acquisition. It costs up to 5 to 7X more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain existing customers but you still need new customers patronizing your business. My process improvement goal was to try to make the customer referral process more efficient for both the small business owner and consumers. Marketing studies show that eighty-nine (89)% of consumers are willing to refer a business if they like what they have purchased but only 11% of small business owners, on average, even ask for a customer referral. Entrepreneur magazine has stated, through a survey (2017) that they conducted that eighty-five (85%) of small business owners state that customer referrals are indeed the best way to acquire new customers. Creating a web and app-based solution that allows small business owners to efficiently communicate with their customers and those customers value family and friend referrals is what Virely is about. Virely is a customer experience improvement tool.
So when you think about sharing a referral of a small business with someone that is in your social network, shouldn’t you be using an app-based solution such as Virely to make that referral process trackable (to ensure the referral gets relayed to the business quickly) and also rewarding with referral reward discounts? Typically when you make a referral, the information relayed from the referring party to the business eventually happens but is often delayed and the referrer and referee often times are not financially rewarded but simply thanked. The biggest reward an entrepreneur such as myself can receiving is truly understanding how a customer feels about completing a routine task and understanding what their emotional, financial and time payoffs are from using something they plan to incorporate into their daily lives. Beta testing of Virely has been very positive, to date, with a full web-based and iOS & Android versions all being launched in Q1 2022. Stay tuned and thanks for checking out the Virely blog!
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