A Startup's Secret Sauce
A secret sauce can make a recipe a successful bestseller, from a burger to a Michelin star dish. But your secret sauce can make or break your startup business too. Focusing on your 1% uniqueness factor can be vital to:
Provide customers with a solution that other businesses cannot deliver
Offer you protection from copycat products that might take the benefits of a new market, product or service you have created
Attract investment (yes, secret sauce is one of the “ingredients” investors will look for in a pitch deck)
But what is a secret sauce in the context of a startup business? It’s your unfair advantage, it’s your sustainable competitive advantage. Essentially it’s what you do better than anyone else in producing a valuable solution for your customers and it’s based around resources and capabilities. When you think of resources, think of all your assets (tangible, intangible) at your disposal (information, knowledge etc). When you think of capabilities think of firm-specific processes, specialised expertise and any other capability which can provide a source of advantage. This means that they provide the customers with significant benefits, so are hard for a competitor to copy.
Here are just a few examples of possible elements of a successful secret sauce:
Strong customer relationship and customer service (think of Amazon)
Intellectual property
Key / exclusive partnerships
Speed to market
Highly talented team
Culture
Often the most compelling secret sauce is one which combines more than one element in a unique way, not only delivering customer value, but making it harder for competitors to imitate.
Helping you define your secret sauce is another crucial component of our brand new Activate Flexible Foundation Programme.
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