Marketing facts and stats

Most ideas get vaporised

Remember the Sky Commuter car, the personal plane by Flight Innovations that meant you could literally fly over the rush hour congestion? No? That’s because it’s an example of “vapourware”; a term used to describe a product that has been announced by overoptimistic developers during its building phase but never actually succeeds in the marketplace. Sadly, the Sky Commuter remains a futuristic-sounding dream and, after more than $6m in funding, the project was shelved.

Sometimes it’s the cheaply improvised prototypes that pay off instead. Anthony Fadell’s foam-core board models of his idea, balanced with fishing weights, helped to confound the cynics who thought that there were already too many of his product in the marketplace. Lucky it did too – Fadell was the team leader of Apple’s iPod development team.

Incidentally

Failed attempts don’t pay

It’s a cliché that behind every success is a catalogue of failed attempts, but should you really try and try again? Harvard Business School research suggests that you might save yourself a lot of heartache by giving up at the first hurdle. First-time entrepreneurs who received venture capital funding were found to have a 22 per cent chance of success (defined as going public or filing to go public). Already successful entrepreneurs were far more likely to succeed again: their success rate for later venture-capital backed companies was 34 per cent. But entrepreneurs whose companies had gone bankrupt had only a 23 per cent follow-on success rate. In other words, trying and failing bought the entrepreneurs nothing – it was as if they’d never tried. On the other hand, this could be seen to confirm another cliché: success breeds success.