Startup Strategy: Are You Thrashing In A Red Ocean?

Written By: admin_onstartups.com admin_onstartups.com September 15, 2006

As a general practice, I read a lot of business books (all sorts of topics like sales, marketing, technology, innovation and strategy).  One area that is always difficult to find good reading on is strategy.  Most strategy books are either too broad and clichéd or so academic as to be marginally useful in real-world scenarios.  The issue is further exacerbated for small businesses and startups because they deal with strategy issues that are often different from big businesses.

One of my favorite books of the last several years is “Blue Ocean Strategy”.  If you haven’t read this book yet, you should.

In the meantime, Brian Halligan, the co-founder of HubSpot (my startup) has written a great article on Blue Ocean strategy as applied to small business.  This is on our new “Small Business 2.0” blog.  Here’s a link to the article:  Blue Ocean Strategy:  A Small Business Case StudyBlue Ocean strategy is all about playing by finding large, open “blue oceans” of opportunity instead of dueling it out in the highly competitive red oceans where the rules of engagement are already predefined.  I encourage you to read Brian’s article.  It’s a good intro to the concepts of the book.

The HubSpot team has been busily working on our product.  We have now decided to start posting regularly to our new blog:  SmallBusiness2.0 -- internet marketing blog.  Stay tuned for some new articles (about one a week).  If you’re a regular reader here, chances are you’ll enjoy that blog too.  Note:  Don’t judge us (yet) by the look and feel of the Small Business 2.0 website.  Its ugly (and we know it).  We have designers working on that problem now.  But, we didn’t want to wait any longer so decided to go ahead and start our regular posting.  

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