A Theory for Increasing Your Company's Chance of Survival

buy the rumor, sell the news

I’ve been noodling around with an idea about how companies, especially startups, can enhance their chances of thriving. Basically, the more contact points a company has with prospective customers, the better its chances of thriving in a competitive market place. I think of this as expanding the company’s surface area.

Think of a computer network topological diagram:

The more nodes (computers, servers, etc.) that are connected to the network, the larger its surface area. So, too, with a company’s connections to prospective customers: the more connections that a company forges with prospective customers, the greater its chances of landing any of those connections as actual paying customers.

In other words, the more widespread your marketing the greater your chances of success. This is, of course, obvious. Comparing marketing dispersion to computer network topology is perhaps not usual, but there is an insight here, I think, which is this: scalable marketing efforts, such as via social media channels and email newsletters (such as the one you’re reading right now), can go a long way to growing a startup’s network surface area, and thus increasing its chances of survival.