The greatest impediment to success for businesses on the Internet is their overall structure. Businesses are structured in a top down manner that demands continued growth and expansion for success. Power is centralized in the hands of a few who attempt to move masses of consumers their way through vehicles of mass influence. But the Web, is the disruptive technology upending that paradigm.
The Web is the business parallel universe. The place where small is big, niche is king and the power is in the hands of the individual. The traditional vehicles of mass influence: broadcast, print and the like are dead. Centralized influence continues to be confounded by the power and influence of the individual.
Which is why we are in the middle of a massive Capitalist Revolution. A tectonic transfer of power. It reminds me of the Lily Tomlin line, “did you hear about the lab rats that changed the behavior of lab technicians by refusing pellets?” Before consumers could either choose to buy or not to buy. Today consumers can change the behavior of corporations, not just by refusing their offerings but by insisting on not buying until the Internet serves up the least expensive price causing a a lemming race to the bottom by retailers. A suicide move if ever there was one!
But individuals are not just consumers, they are entrepreneurs as well. And the Internet favors the most creative and industrious among them. Individual online entrepreneurs can do well what no centralized corporate power can. They can reach into small slices of the marketplace where Passionistas live and play and they can commune with them. And sell to them profitably in a most authentic manner.
What is critical is that these industrious individuals create something unique, relevant and important to these slice markets. Yes, it is a Capitalist model, but one that recognizes that one small market can deliver a margin that delivers a solid middle class life style.
Individual entrepreneurs have an opportunity to own loyal passionate markets that completely elude large corporations. Within the next decade we will witness the rise of small, self-funded business and the death of corporate power, by a combination of thousand cuts AND massive self-inflicted wounds.
