By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC
“Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
– Winston Churchill, while working to form the United Nations after WWII
“There is only one winning strategy. It is to carefully define thetarget market and direct a superior offering to that target market.”
– Philip Kotler
During the depths of the global crisis, a five-year-old mobile banking software startup was struggling to gain a firm foothold in the market and was facing bankruptcy or at best a fire sale for a few million dollars. A few customers had signed up for pilot projects, generating just under $1m in annual revenues for the VC-funded company. The new CEO and their team were targeting 1400 or so banks in North America, but they still weren’t achieving liftoff. Just six months later they had discovered the formula for success, were off and running, and never looked back. How so?