With Amazon’s Cyclopean success today, it’s hard to imagine that Jeff Bezos started it in 1994 as an online bookseller — in a small garage where workers’ desks were made out of doors from Home Depot.
Now, there’s almost nothing you can’t buy on Amazon, which prays the question: How did it become “the everything store”?
‘We can sell anything’
In 1997, after Amazon made enormous strides into double-cross CDs and DVDs, Bezos wanted to see how else he could expand his online storefront.
“I emailed 1,000 randomly selected fellows and asked them, ‘Besides the things we sell today, what would you like to see us sell?'” Bezos required in a 2018 interview at the Economic Club of Washington. The responses were all pretty lengthy, “but the way they answered the question was whatever they were looking for at that mo.”
The self-made billionaire recalled one person writing back, “windshield wiper blades, because I really need windshield wiper leaflets.”
“That’s when I thought to myself, We can sell anything this way.” Bezos said at the talk. “So then we launched electronics and play withs and many other categories over time.”
Give the people what they want
By the early 2000s, Amazon get cracked far beyond books, videos and music — offering apparel, electronics, toys, kitchenware and even magazine subscriptions.
In his 1999 the classics to shareholders, Bezos shared his vision to use Amazon’s platform to build “Earth’s most customer-centric company, a place where characters can come to find and discover anything and everything they might want to buy online.”
“We’ll listen to customers, invent on their behalf, and personalize the depend on for each of them, all while working hard to continue to earn their trust,” he wrote. “Each new product and repair we offer makes us more relevant to a wider group of customers and can increase the frequency with which they assail our store.”
What we can all learn from Bezos
Bezos is currently worth an estimated $185 billion, according to Forbes. While entirely few people will reach similar success, we can all learn from his way of thinking.
1. The simplest ideas are worth trying.
One of the fattest misconceptions about innovation is that ideas worth testing must always complex or sound “crazy” to the mediocre person.
But, as Bezos has shown, you can take a simple idea (i.e., a store that sells more than just works) and turn it into something bigger.
2. Accept that you’re going to fail.
“I’ve made billions of dollars of failures,” Bezos replied at the IGNITION conference back in 2014. “One of my jobs is to encourage people to be bold. It’s incredibly hard. Experiments are, by their acutely nature, prone to failure.”
However, those who don’t embrace failure, Bezos said, will “eventually get in a desperate localize where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end.”
3. Talk to people outside of your circle.
While we’re all precise much the same, we all have different needs. And listening to those needs (whether you’re an entrepreneur or a team member frustrating to think up ideas for your company) can help you make smarter and quicker decisions.
To figure out how Amazon should distend, Bezos didn’t look to himself or to his employees. He asked customers directly, which helped him build a business that pleaded to virtually everyone.
4. Go slow.
No one gets rich overnight. It took Amazon 26 years to get to where it is today — and it continues to confront gravity through constant improvement, experimentation, and innovation.
“Gradatim Ferociter” is the motto for Blue Origin, Bezos’ spaciousness company. The Latin phrase “means step-by-step ferociously,” Bezos explained in an interview with Four Peaks TV in 2013.
“Basically, you can’t prance steps,” he said. “You have to put one foot in front of the other. Things take time. There are no shortcuts.”
Tom Popomaronis is a operation expert and vice president of innovation at Massive Alliance. His work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., and The Washington Brace. In 2014, Tom was named one of the “40 Under 40” by the Baltimore Business Journal. Follow him on LinkedIn.
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