Consumer Electronics
Recently, I thought it would be a good idea to open up a small, independent consumer electronics store. My thinking is that "Wired" magazine is a really compelling periodical that stays on the cutting edge of technology. The audience of the magazine is pretty mainstream, but there's certainly a small segment of people reading it that really geek out over new tech products.
A retail chain like Radio Shack or Best Buy serves a mainstream audience too, but they both fall short of delivering an optimal experience to tech geeks. The serve the middle of the bell curve just fine, where people are looking to walk in and buy a Dell laptop or iPhone case. But the nerds at the fringes don't get much of an experience.
I believe it starts with the employees you hire. Get people who really love photography, building robots with legos, or hacking the bluetooth in their toasters to do cool things. Offer them a decent wage, and encourage them to bring their hobbies to work with them to share with the people who come in. Can't you think of at least one friend you might know who would enjoy working under these circumstances?
Personal passion will always outsell following the instructions in a training manual.
I pass by a comic book shop near my home almost daily, and the nerds who work there are always playing some game (maybe D&D) at odds hours of the evening. It's not just a comic book shop...you can go in and buy a graphic novel, but there's stuff happening at the same time. There's a sense of community. Such a store could hold local competitions to build a better widget, or other contests.
Like a lot of ideas, this one is neither good nor bad in and of itself. Whether the idea would work is reality is larger based on the finesse of the execution, and probably some luck. You'd need good people, and you'd need an eye for creating an experience people would like enough to return to.
I don't know how well it would scale. Business school hammered it into me that businesses should always be worried about how to achieve volume, but the elements that make this work--the largest of which is personable staff--don't scale. I'm not sure that worrying about scale should always be part of the plan.
A retail chain like Radio Shack or Best Buy serves a mainstream audience too, but they both fall short of delivering an optimal experience to tech geeks. The serve the middle of the bell curve just fine, where people are looking to walk in and buy a Dell laptop or iPhone case. But the nerds at the fringes don't get much of an experience.
I believe it starts with the employees you hire. Get people who really love photography, building robots with legos, or hacking the bluetooth in their toasters to do cool things. Offer them a decent wage, and encourage them to bring their hobbies to work with them to share with the people who come in. Can't you think of at least one friend you might know who would enjoy working under these circumstances?
Personal passion will always outsell following the instructions in a training manual.
I pass by a comic book shop near my home almost daily, and the nerds who work there are always playing some game (maybe D&D) at odds hours of the evening. It's not just a comic book shop...you can go in and buy a graphic novel, but there's stuff happening at the same time. There's a sense of community. Such a store could hold local competitions to build a better widget, or other contests.
Like a lot of ideas, this one is neither good nor bad in and of itself. Whether the idea would work is reality is larger based on the finesse of the execution, and probably some luck. You'd need good people, and you'd need an eye for creating an experience people would like enough to return to.
I don't know how well it would scale. Business school hammered it into me that businesses should always be worried about how to achieve volume, but the elements that make this work--the largest of which is personable staff--don't scale. I'm not sure that worrying about scale should always be part of the plan.