Are you looking for a fight?

blueoceancover
Originally uploaded by coffeeboy.

I have been reading Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne and it rocks! The idea is basically an ancient one and usually Eastern. The best way to win is not to fight at all. How's that for business advice? "Don't compete!" They show that the business ideas that have changed the world and been very successful were the ones that created a new marketspace and made the competition irrelevant. This is more than adding value to the same type of thing or raising the technological bar to newer and faster. It is centered in a process they call "value innovation" in which you ignore the rules of your industry and create something different for people left out of the current equation, resulting in a lowering of costs for you and raising of value for the customer. Cool, huh?

This idea is at the core of Coffeeboy and all our talk about using the Northern Italian espresso tradition to distinguish small indie shops from Starbucks. Instead of trying to do the whole "giant cup with dark bitter espresso covered up with syrup thing", do the "little 6-8oz, naturally sweet creamy cappuccino thing." Let Starbucks have the wall-sized menu with 32 flavors of blendies and strip down to the 5 to 7 drinks of Italy done perfectly every time. You can't be better than Starbucks at being Starbucks, so don't try. Do something better, more genuine, and dramatically different. Is there a market for that here? There are over 200,000 espresso bars in Italy, a country the size of California. There are under 20,000 in the whole United States. People come back from Italy every day saying, "I don't really drink coffee here, but over there it is soooooooo good. We had a cappuccino every morning." Let Starbucks and their clones fight it out in the red ocean full of sharks and blood. We, on the other hand, will paddle out into the glassy tubes of the untapped American espresso market- Lo-fi style!