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Going Broader and Deeper

Uzair Ahmad Khan

October 14, 2019

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This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, LawSikho.

What works now that the blue ocean opportunities are already taken?

Imagine a seaside town. The town has a history.

Once upon a time, it was a village of fishermen. They were poor. One day a smart and imaginative young man came there and saw an untapped opportunity. He bought some land on the beach and set up a large resort. The land was cheap, but there was hardly any support infrastructure. For the next 10 years, he struggled to put his resort on the tourist map. And he eventually did. Tourists began to trickle in, and then eventually this became a popular offbeat holiday destination.

Then reporters wrote about it. Other people also bought up the nearby land and set up more resorts. The place began to become a tourism hotspot.

Soon, a big hotel chain bought the original resort for 100 million dollars. The man retired. He became a legend. People went nuts about this beach town. Every inch of land next to the sea was converted into resorts.

Even the land far from the beach began to sell for very high value as desperate wannabe hoteliers tried to set up more resorts.

However, with every new hotel coming up, the next one has a progressively diminishing chance of success. The first few resorts, thanks to their legendary status and fame, continues to do well. But the new ones struggle and shut down within years in the face of fierce competition. Still, some people keep trying to do the same thing! There are always new fools to try their luck in the slot machine.

Still more people wanted to take advantage of the great opportunity in this shore town. What can they do? Is there any opportunity remaining? Or is everything exhausted?

Why we have to go broader and deeper

It is hard in a way to develop a new market. You are a pioneer trying to break ground where nobody ever has even tried. It is dangerous, it is heroic, but it is also a rare opportunity to find such a space for heroic effort.

But when you are a pioneer you have an advantage. Your success is not relative. Whatever you have done is already the best in the world and you become synonymous with the product or service.

Like Kodak and photography were for a long long time.

Xerox and photocopying.

Apple and iPad. I can’t even think of another word that describes an iPad.

People who are pioneers, once they find their foothold, they become successful quickly and then go on to become legends.

For the next person trying to do the same thing, it is even harder! More people succeed, harder it becomes. Columbus is celebrated, but now there are captains who have made it from Spain to the USA a thousand times but nobody knows their name!

What does one do then? How can we also become a legend and achieve great success?

You either go broader, or you go deeper.

Doing what everyone else does would not create the same level of success

Tanuj Kalia of Lawctopus once wrote about an amazing phenomenon. Many law students saw Lawctopus, and its success and decided why not do the same thing ourselves. It seemed easy enough to replicate! Over a dozen new websites came up, all of which tried to do the same things – publishing call for papers and other opportunities for law students, and write internship experiences.

However, none of them worked. Lawctopus was already solving the problem adequately. There was no scope for another cheap knock off. Soon those other people shut down their experiments and went home. They never made any dent to Lawctopus’ traffic or business.

It is hard to succeed with a poor imitation. However, if anyone else did the same work better than Lawctopus, or perhaps came up with a more compelling value proposition, then who knows what could happen.

Different always works. If you approach the same problem from a different angle and find a different solution then it is highly likely to work. At least you have a shot.

However, blindly copying what others already did rarely works.

There is a famous story about Steven Spielberg. He walked into the studios of MGM in Hollywood with a backpack, with no experience in the film industry, and said he was there to direct movies. It takes a huge amount of courage and bravado to do this. It was so crazy, he was actually taken seriously, out of curiosity and respect. He was given the job of an assistant director at the studio.

However, if you copy this stunt today, is that likely to work? I couldn’t tell. It might. However, I am certain that it can’t work anymore if dozens of youngsters with dreams in their eyes begin to copy this exact trick.

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What worked today, may not work tomorrow. And if everyone starts going down the beaten track, it is guaranteed to not work.

In the same way that it does not work if you try to build a law practice in 2019 in the way, people did once upon a time in 1999. This is why you should not listen to the advice of retired judges and senior advocates about how to build a law practice. Their advice was relevant a decade or two earlier. They have no idea about the challenges young lawyers face these days, and they have no clue about what is coming.

You are in a better position to figure this than they are! You just have to go broader. Else, you must go deeper.

How to go broader and deeper to create a competitive advantage?

Going broader is going where no one has not gone yet. Is there another fishing village with the same potential to become a resort town? Or maybe you find a historical place with the potential to become a tourist hub? You could go broader and find a place like that. And then set up a resort there.

It is impossible to set up a world-class resort with a shitty property after all. But there might be other properties far away from where everyone is looking, with untold potential and a viable price tag. You can differentiate yourself by going broader and finding new blue ocean opportunities, which are not yet crowded out.

This is the domain of adventurers, explorers, and innovators. And it can be very rewarding.

You do not have to go broader geographically only, though that is a valid option. Going broader means trying new things that others have not tried yet. It means finding opportunities that are undiscovered and untapped.

For example, everyone is trying to make more and more advanced, complicated TVs and phones. However, older people are deeply uncomfortable with advanced new tech that puts them on a learning curve. They prefer a simple tool with obvious buttons and knobs that they are familiar with.

What if someone decides to launch the most low-tech phones and computers? Will that work? I am not sure, but there definitely seems to be a large enough market of old people who hate complicated technology. If someone was to try this contrarian new idea, that will certainly be counted as going broader.

However, not all of us have something new to discover. Are there any new continents to be found? Any new poles of the earth to plant our flags upon? Or even any new planets in the solar system to be found? I doubt.

However, the other option is always there. Go deeper. Especially when you can’t go broader, this is a superb option. Instead of finding a new planet, you begin to learn more about the composition of a planet we already know a lot about!

You do not need to discover blue ocean opportunities but you need to dig deeper and do what others are not willing to do.

There was a company called Akosha, which showed us how to build a solution for legal problems Indians face every day. It was sad that they abandoned the business and moved on to do something else because they got lots of funding to do so. However, while Akosha worked on consumer disputes, it built something pretty amazing! Users still miss it and complain about their disappearance.

So there was always a market for consumer disputes. Lawyers worked on consumer disputes matters, even long before Akosha came into existence, either on behalf of companies or for consumers. Akosha also solved the same problem, but with a lot more innovation and strategy.

They used technology to find people with consumer problems. They gave away free information to build trust and get people hooked. Then they built tight processes to resolve matters without going to court but directly connecting with the company. Finally, if the matter was still unresolved, they helped the consumer to file a consumer case on their own.

It worked wonders. Major brands tied up with Akosha to avoid consumer cases. Akosha also got tons of users, until they continued.

I would say it was possible to go even deeper. One could provide many services like DIY consumer litigation support, helping clients to find lawyers, rating consumer lawyers based on their performance, launching a consumer rating service for brands, helping companies with burgeoning consumer litigation all over the country. All remain unsolved problems to a large extent.

You could go deeper with any problem. Vakilsearch or India Filings, for example, have done so in the registration and filing space. They brought efficiency and cost-effective services in a market where law firms used to charge 10-20 times more. They unlocked a whole new segment of clients by going deeper and figuring out how to offer company registration or trademark registration at a scale for a fraction of the price.

Nandan Kamath, for example, went deeper with his law firm LawNK. Sports Law was never seen as a viable area of practice by law firms. While many law firms always claimed to have a sports law practice desk or whatever, they never really focussed on this industry. Nandan Kamath made sports law his passion and went very deep into the sector when few would have bet on it.

Going deeper means understanding the industry better, seeing what are the services it needs, and understand ing where the gaps in the market exist. Doing the same thing everyone else is doing is way much inferior compared to this.

It can also mean building a deeper level of knowledge and creating value that others have not thought of creating yet.

We went deeper into the legal education industry by building courses with more insights and utility, by offering more value to our learners such as live online classes that they can attend after work hours, by offering a one-month money-back guarantee (read here).

Going deeper means being willing to help your clients and users like nobody else is ready to. It is a sure shot way to win.

What enables one to go broader and deeper?

Is it courage, bravado, heroics and faith that helps us to go broader or deeper?

Can education create a competitive advantage?

Is it the indomitable desire to be different and to excel?

What creates breakthrough success in business? We could look at the world of business, as well as the legal profession.

Usually, it comes down to providing something valuable to your users or customers that your competitors find hard to do, and the market having awareness about your superiority.

Much is talked about strategies to reach out to the market, to get more clients and how to charge more. Many of the ideas are just hair-brained. Many lawyers truly believe that if they drive expensive cars or have a plush office it helps them to charge more from clients.

Maybe in the short run. Maybe from some foolish clients. But can one build something of lasting value in the long term by relying on such gimmicks? I am yet to see even one such case. Gimmicks and drama fade away, eventually, the actors are exposed and the only thing that really counts is high-quality work done with care, and therefore results delivered to clients on a consistent basis.

And that is where more attention and focus is needed. How can we drastically generate more value for our clients compared to what is already available?

How often do you engage with that question?

I am at the Morpheus Gurkul for this weekend, and I have been talking to and learning from young entrepreneurs who have succeeded in building amazing businesses, at a relatively young age.

I am stunned by the breadth and depth of their work. Innovation is boundless!

I came across a lady who runs a 70 people service organization teaching other organizations on how to use productivity and process frameworks like Agile and kanban. My roommate runs a training organization for coders, where the trainees do not pay for the training, but after a boot camp are placed with companies who pay for that training! Another person has created a technology that combines different networks available in an area to create strong wifi even in places where network is otherwise poor. It is used to law enforcement, military, and companies working in remote areas such as mining or construction. Someone else is building software that reduces cost overruns in the construction industry.

Disruption is the name of the game here. People are building massive businesses and generating incredible value out of thin air, simply by creating new business models, introducing more efficiency and utility, and by bringing new expertise in fields where they were missing.

Why are not lawyers as innovative?

How come we do not have consultants who help lawyers to be more productive and get more efficient? How come tech has dozens of project management and productivity framework and legal work has none?

How come lawyers do not invest in innovative products that solve massive existing problems?

How come so many lawyers walk down the beaten tracks but there are so few to try to solve the new problems arising out of constant changes and shifts in the society?

The first step the younger lawyers need to take is to realize that what got their seniors success would be unlikely to take them where they want to get. I believe the intention to push boundaries, either by going broader or deeper than their predecessors have, is critical.

The second step is to educate yourself. The skills to go broader and deeper are both hard to cultivate, simply because they required practice, courage, effort and time. You need to master the critical skills of any business, or else going broader or deeper will not be even possible.

It’s not enough just to go through the motions of education, however. Everybody goes through a lot of education these days, but simply spending the years and money with educational institutes do not really train them for breakthrough success. You must go broader and deeper in educating yourself too!

You need something only you can offer your clients—push as many boundaries as you have to until you get there.

In order to make a dent in any industry, it’s vital to develop a strategy customized to one’s own skills, desires, and ambition.

What is your strategy? Do you have one? You could get on a call with our experts and discuss this.

Here is the number to call: 011-40845203

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Diploma in Advanced Contract Drafting, Negotiation and Dispute Resolution

Diploma in Cyber Law, Fintech Regulations and Technology Contracts

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Certificate Course in Companies Act

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