Making Your Startup Stand Out In a Sea of Competition

My company, Blue Jazz Consulting, recently launched a new startup called aLawPractice.com. The goal is to reduce the headaches of managing an legal practice while making it simple and fun – something not commonly found in practice management software.

They made their product simple because it doesn’t take weeks to learn. They made it fun by helping the practice earn more revenue. How? Through a simple iPhone application that helps them capture billable time on the go. While that may not sound like a lot of fun, it does to the attorney that dislikes tracking their time. Fun because it allows them to capture what would have been lost revenue. Fun because it allows them to use this application in their favorite restaurant or coffee spot.

Guy Kawasaki recently wrote an article about a company at CES that did the same thing: Satzuma. In his article, he mentions three principles that help you stand out among a sea of competition:

Satzuma illustrates three important skills for small businesses:

• Do one thing well. A small business has to do one thing well. It cannot be all things to all people for two reasons: first, it’s hard to do many things well. Second, it’s hard to communicate that you do many things well.
• Make it a fun thing. Picture this: you’re pushing and shoving 100,000 of your closest friends to see the latest OLED TV, and you stumble upon a booth with USB missle launchers and aquariums. Who would not at least smile, if not stop, to learn more?
• Think different. I didn’t search every square foot of CES to find other USB missile launchers, but there was a sea of iPhone and iPod case manufacturers that I zipped past. It’s much better to be the one USB-fun-device company than the umpteenth iPhone accessory company.

If nothing else, Satzuma proves that by doing things this way, you can attract attention in something as large and noisy as CES. Truly, when it comes to small business, if there’s a skill, there’s a way.

aLawPractice.com has done the same thing: focus on being the best SaaS-based law practice management platform by focusing on capturing and managing lost time in a simple and fun way. I would encourage your startup to do the same.