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  1. Politics
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3 January 2018updated 21 Sep 2023 5:37pm

Executing business ideas is easier than ever, and it’s going to kill a lot of companies

By Shareactor

Digital disruption, as it’s been called for a while now, has already killed a lot of companies. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Backend as a Service (BaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) are making it easier than ever to execute on a business idea. Meanwhile, A.I. and its myriad applications have already changed the economic landscape, and it’s just getting started.

If you weren’t aware of how fundamentally the transition to digital has changed things, consider the fact that 52% of the Fortune 500 list in 2000 doesn’t exist anymore. Executing on a business idea is getting easier as BaaS firms tout statistics like 90% of resources for a business application are spent on rebuilding infrastructure. Our research has shown that anywhere from 50-80% of an app is rebuilt over and over and over again.  These ‘as a Service’ companies reduce the resources wasted on those processes.

While A.I. and machine learning have already changed the competitive landscape, only a handful of big companies are really leveraging the technology. The vast majority of SMEs are not. And by vast, I mean basically none. Virtually none of them have the capability of a giant like Google to apply machine learning to their data.  And expertise is sparse, to say the least, so almost every one of them is going to be dependent on third parties when they finally get around to address their needs.

Adapting to this new landscape is the challenge. We’ve been taught for decades that owning your own IP, building it yourself and creating more will add value to your company. Those ideas about how to build value don’t make sense anymore. Digital has connected everything, making the shoulders of giants accessible to everyone. Consumers’ expectations that a new service or product is slick, knows what they want, serves them immediately, works smoothly and leaves them delighted have driven businesses into a corner. They need to execute on ideas faster than ever and deliver something that works great, because if it doesn’t, the customer is on to the next thing, or to the better executed version of the idea. There are no second chances.

We realized that we needed a way to execute ideas faster, leverage existing machine learning capabilities and build the groundwork to make it easier to apply the A.I. breakthroughs of tomorrow. Stop wasting time and money rebuilding infrastructure. Build in A.I. competence. Focus only on adding value for your customers.

This is why we built the ShareActor Platform. Starting focused on the Sharing Economy and on-demand businesses, we built modules that handle users, payments, products, orders, scheduling, deliveries, subscriptions, a dashboard and more. All of the infrastructure we saw getting rebuilt over and over? It’s done. And of course we handle all the other BaaS tasks as well. When your app is built on our platform, your data is structured in our system so you can access a recommendation engine, price optimization or complex analysis with the flip of a switch. Future custom A.I. work is easier, faster and more cost effective as we ensure data is clean, structured and linked to our data science platform.

We’ve been eating our own dogfood since we started in 2016.  Six applications in, along with independent custom data science work, we’ve tested our platform. It’s repeatedly been used to prove business validity, is driving revenue and used to raise capital for scaling and market expansion.  We’re a tiny dev team and have delivered all these applications on timeframes that compete or beat big consulting firms at prices that should embarrass them.

Executing on business ideas is easier, faster and more cost effective than ever.  For companies that adapt to this new landscape, there’s a lot of work to do.  For those that don’t, they just won’t work anymore.

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