Thinking of starting a Product-as-a-Service business but don’t know where to begin?
In this clip from the ReCommerce Podcast, Tuomo Laine (CEO of TWICE Commerce) offers practical advice for new entrepreneurs ready to dive into servitization. Whether you have a product idea, technical know-how, or just passion for a niche, you can start small and scale smart.
Covered in this clip:
- Why niche knowledge and basic repair skills are the foundation
- The importance of owning or sourcing your first item(s)
- How to test demand before building your operation
- Why it’s safer to find orders you can’t fulfill—than stock you can’t sell
Karri: If I'm a new entrepreneur and I'm really into this product-as-a-service idea, how do I get started? If I have basically nothing, I might have like an idea or product niche that I'm into and maybe know how to do some maintenance or some servicing. So how do I actually start my business?
Tuomo: Yeah, well I think that last point that you made about you might be into a niche or certain product, I think that might be for most categories it's almost like a need, because then in order to go to the servitization two things need to happen. Well that one item will go through many customers and in between you usually have to do some maintenance and if you don't know how to do that, that's probably the first thing to figure out: like how do you fix a broken thing? Maybe for some categories it's less relevant that are in nature more durable, that they don't have many fixable pieces. Now that's a critical thing, then I think that then the second question is that do you have the good? Like in the first place, if you don't have that item, you just have to know how, then you have to go out there and buy those from somewhere or get the supplies so to say on which you run your business. And then lastly, I think for anyone starting a business, maybe the rule number zero is that always figure out whether you have any customers before jumping in. So set up a website, set up a Facebook group, set up something and start selling and then seeing whether you get orders and then figure out how do you actually fulfill those orders. It's a lot safer way to get to entrepreneurship is to figure out that I had sales that I had kind of demand that I couldn't meet than the other way around where I had supply for which I couldn't find demand. So the former is usually the better way to get into entrepreneurship.