This is a guest post from Jason Duff, founder and CEO of COMSTOR Outdoor.
Overpriced real estate. Insane work hours. Fierce competition against other smart people. Against huge odds, smart young people flock to Silicon Valley and other hubs to find the next billion-dollar unicorn.
I’m 34 years old, and I’ve taken the exact opposite approach in my entrepreneurial career. And it’s worked.
Instead of starting a tech company, I built “old fashioned”, profitable, multimillion-dollar businesses and helped create hundreds of jobs in my community, all before I turned 30. Today, I own 1,500+ self-storage units, 40+ commercial real estate properties, and 400+ outdoor advertising billboards.
Instead of moving to a major city, I stayed in the same 13,000-person community where I grew up in, Bellefontaine, Ohio.
Instead of competing in an area where there is a lot of hype and really smart competitors, I often have no direct competitors and the assets I buy are dramatically discounted.
Many people think my approach to business is outdated. But I’ve learned something fundamental about life and business that I think most smart people my age miss…
The Product Adoption Cycle We’ve All Been Taught Is Wrong
For more than 50 years, experts have examined the adoption of new products in a marketplace via a five-stage process known as Roger’s Bell Curve, consisting of Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards.
However, as the resurgence of older technologies demonstrates, there is actually a hidden additional stage at the end that most entrepreneurs miss: the Retro stage.
Most entrepreneurs focus on using technology to innovate new fields, and they target innovators to adopt their products. I focus on reinventing existing markets and targeting retro adopters.
Most products, technologies, and cultural artifacts (i.e., songs, books, articles, and movies) don’t just die and disappear. Instead, they can live on in the Retro stage as survivor technologies. Even if the market for these products might be smaller in the Retro stage than at their height, they still represent opportunities for reinvention and relevance. Importantly, they also often survive with fewer innovative competitors.
We see this same dynamic play out in other aspects of life. Many songs, books, articles, and movies get attention at first and then disappear–but a significant segment of such artifacts in our culture ultimately become ‘classics.’ There is actually a name for this theory–the Lindy Effect–which suggests that the longer an idea, a technology or a cultural icon survives, the more likely it is to continue to survive even longer into the future.