Commitment Phobia Among Entrepreneurs

A year ago, Slideshare.net was a well-positioned business. As soon as you landed on the home page, it was clear as to what the site stood for. You used the technology to share your PowerPoint presentations more effectively. The site description was, "Slideshare - A place to share and discover presentations and slideshows." For the lay person, Slideshare was "Like YouTube but for PowerPoint presentations."

Now, if you visit the site, you will notice that the site has expanded it's offerings. The site description now reads, "Upload and share your PowerPoint & Keynote presentations, Word & PDF documents and professional videos on SlideShare. Add audio to make a webinar. Capture leads with your presentations."

What this means is that they have simultaneously gone to war against multiple, powerful competitors.

Share Video = YouTube
Webinar = Webex, DimDim
Capture Leads = Salesforce.com
Share Documents = Scribd

My guess is that they will probably see an immediate surge in users because of the variety in their offerings. Then, if a well-positioned, competitor focusing on sharing slide-decks comes along, they will be have a hard time retaining their category leader status in the "share slide-shows" category.

Why do some entrepreneurs do this?
For the same reason that some young people put off getting married.
Commitment Phobia!

The best decision is to focus on a narrow area that is growing fast and become the category leader.
The next best decision is to slip up and focus on a narrow area that is probably not growing fast. So even though you're not category leader, you'll never grow to become Microsoft or Google.
The worst decision is to try and become all things to all people.

This may happen out of fear (what if the niche I've selected is not big enough?)
Or it may happen out of greed (If I can be number one in multiple areas, then my company will be a billion dollar, conglomerate!)

Commitment phobia usually results in tag-lines with the words "Total Solutions for ..." or "One Stop Shop ..." Or they result in long tag lines with lots of commas (technology to help you share videos, audios, photos, presentations & documents ...)

Yet another thing for entrepreneurs to be ever-vigilant about.