I recently spent a few hours looking at as much startup as I could and here are some general thoughts about the industry and markets targeted by some projects.
Startups have fashions, big trends on which a lot of projects are focusing. Some of those trends have clearly made it out of thinkers mind, some others stayed there waiting for the big idea, the breakdown of entry barriers or simply a more general product market fit. Let’s not talk about social networks once again to mention those industries where things remain to be done, attracting a lot of actors but with no clear winner yet.
Advertising
Targeting, monitoring, remarketing, optimizing. Acquiring customers is a difficult job, a lot of money is going through the advertising market. A lot of companies are trying to get their hands on some part of this huge market which gets more complex every days.
To my feeling this sector is driven by three key points:
- Finance: a lot of money and the will to always get more for less money that feeds new idea
- Market: very low entry barriers
- Technology: ever evolving ways to know and interact with your audience and customers
Health
Everybody feels it, something could be done around health. The health industry is always costing more and more and, as patient, we haven’t seen anything fresh since a long time.
The big ones also tried to do something around it, governments, Microsoft, and even Google. Unfortunately Google gave up, so no, you will not be forced into a scary Google Health / Google Plus integration. Providing value added to the customer when the practioners have the decisions in their hands may not be the right strategy.
Startups that want to improve health are backing to the “quantified self” approach: avoiding traditional health workflow to cut through the problem of complexity and entry barrier.
Recruitment
For the money it costs and for the risk it conveys, recruitment is a key topic. Everybody is looking to the grail of recruitment trying to build online what makes most good recruitment offline: network. What if a company would be able to leverage all their internal potential to hire new skills? Using social connections seems like the obvious, but as far as I know, aside referral incentives no industry level practice or system has made it to the top.
