On always looking for opportunities

There are great opportunities - all the time. We just have to be actively looking for them. And we should be prepared to be able to catch the moment when it comes.

I went to a local Sushi place recently. Nothing exciting, however, instead of writing down my name and contacts on a piece of paper, I was asked to simply scan a barcode and fill in a very simple and unobtrusive form. Easy. Here in Australia, restaurants are required to keep a record of the who and when visited their spot so that if a COVID-19 case shows up, they can do a more effective contact tracking. OK, a few days later, I went to a different restaurant and was asked to scan a barcode again and enter my details. They were using the same service as my details were prefilled. All I had to do was click a big centred green button. How convenient.

On the way home, I was thinking about how this service was built specifically to cater to the needs around COVID. It was very simple and ALL restaurants around Australia and New Zealand, have to comply with this new requirement. I checked the website of the service, a SaaS product, its entry price was $19 per month, and they stated that 60,000 businesses around Aus and NZ were using them! That’d be around $120,000 per month for a simple check-in app. Of course, you will have to spend some money on marketing and effort on your go-to-market strategy, yet it’s a perfect example of catching the moment.

I, and I imagine many other makers, can easily build such a simple service in a month. Even better, a team of a technical and a sales person could bootstrap such a business quite easily should they see the opportunity and execute quickly enough. Yes, this requirement won’t last forever; however, I’m sure that many founders wouldn’t mind making a million dollars in a year.

I believe that similar opportunities show up all the time. All it takes is being prepared so that you can execute quickly enough when you notice them.