Technology Startups: Value Transition, Pre-Empting Risks and Sustaining Relevance

This chapter discusses the reasons why customers buy from tech startups. It is never for the technology excellence, but rather for how the customer perceives the tech solution. This can be for one of the three reasons: competitive advantage, revenue maximisation or cost optimisation. Knowing the real reason helps the startup to lock in a customer, maximise its own revenue or assess the timeline of its own solution. Another area discussed in this chapter is value transition. This happens in every industry as the end user perception of value moves and the incumbent solution providers are unable to pre-empt or create relevance for the new customer need. Recognising this helps the startup to create tomorrow’s value. This chapter summarises the learnings of the previous two chapters in order to capture the sustainability of value for technology startups.