A key measure for success of entrepreneurs
as we've seen at MIT is the ability to select a market
and then to be disciplined and deselect other markets.
As much as everybody would love to attack everything at once
and try and solve every problem in the world,
it doesn't make any sense to do that.
You have to focus on one specific market.
As an entrepreneur, as someone trying
to run their own business, it's really, really important
that you not only select your beachhead market,
but select it for strategic reasons
to meet your long-term vision.
It's got to be difficult as a young, ambitious entrepreneur
who sees a world of possibility to deselect some markets.
Was it hard for you?
Yeah.
It's very psychologically taxing, in fact.
You think there's an answer you want to hear,
and you're working really hard to get that answer you want,
but then the data is just showing you
something completely contradictory
to what you want to hear.
And it's really difficult to accept that you were wrong,
but you've got to just do it if you want to be successful.
Think of it this way, and this is
how I explain it to my students.
You're out there and you're trying to catch a rabbit.
Do you try to catch three rabbits at once?
If you try to catch three at once,
you'll end up catching no rabbits.
Try to catch one rabbit at a time,
and you'll be much more successful.
The way we go about this is, like I said,
from a systems perspective, thinking about what we can
and cannot feasibly accomplish.
Part of what we did to segment this market down,
looking at the education, the aerospace,
the healthcare markets, is looking
at what has the most layers of complexity.
So the ones that have the most regulatory compliances
are the ones that we didn't want to get involved in.
For instance, if you're looking at creating anything
in the medical device space, you have
to go through FDA approval.
That we immediately crossed of the list
because, although that might be the money winner down the road,
that's not what's going to get our foot in the door
and get our brand any recognition.
Same thing looking at aerospace.
There's only a few companies in the aerospace, industry maybe
a few dozen in the world.
It's really difficult to break into those markets,
and when you can, you've just landed a really big client,
but until that day you, have no clients,
so we axed that one from the list as well.
Well, by the rule of deselection,
we've come to the realization that you've selected education
as your market.
Tell us about this decision.
Yeah.
So we selected education because I see 3D printing
as being a totally generational thing.
That's really where 3D printing is
going to break into the mainstream of the world,
is when we've trained the next generation of inventors
and thinkers on how to actually think
in the context of this new technology.
Now you'll ask, what if AJ and NVbots
chooses the wrong beachhead market?
What you want to do is if it's going
to fail, fail quickly, eliminate that option,
and focus on the other ones that are higher potential.
Action will produce real data, and that data
will tell you whether your beachhead market will or will
not be viable.