What does your tomorrow look like?

We move around for work, study, love, leisure – and the startup community is stepping up to service those of us who call more than one country home. The downside has been in governmental revenue, i.e. taxes. Corporations – and people - are free to move their money around to the most advantageous markets, and countries have competed in offering tax breaks.

They need to be useful. Useful in that they can be used to pay for goods and services the mass market needs, and usable in that they can be acquired and spent with a minimum of effort. Until the experience of engaging with crypto is equivalent to cash, that’s going to be a tough uphill battle.

Startups need capital, a strong idea that meets a real customer need, the ability to bring that idea to market in a way that works for and appeals to those customers, and marketing to tell the story of the product. Competition is stiff, so the quality of execution (experience) matters at least as much as the strength of the original idea.

Well-designed technology enables a better customer experience, a better/broader service offering, more convenience or more functionality, at minimal additional cost. That will leave companies without digital capabilities unable to compete – they’ll be playing catch-up and that’s not a winning position.

The only thing that will make companies more ethical is financial or regulatory pressure. The bigger the role ethics play in customer choice, the higher a priority ethical awareness will become.

Businesses need to be prepared to shift quickly to adapt to changing sociopolitical conditions, because it’s already abundantly clear that the unexpected – even the irrational – can and will happen. Agility is the new risk management.

The challenge for small businesses is keeping their offer fresh and getting the word out through all the noise – often through peer-to-peer marketplaces like Etsy or social media platforms like Facebook. Of course, for every good idea that sells, there are hundreds of copycats; so the competition is fierce and unlikely to abate anytime soon.

Some people are loyal to the brands and shops they like, while others shop around for bargains and are open to new products. Ultimately, consumers will choose where they buy based on their own hierarchy of needs. A vendor wishing to go direct will need to offer a significant advantage over the competition in at least one of these areas (e.g. convenience, quality, comfort, brand excitement etc.).

Some of the most successful shops these days are lifestyle brands with immersive in-store experiences. City centres like Berlin have had some success converting empty retail space into serial popup spaces: when that popup closes, its customers can switch to the online channel and a new set of merchandise moves in.

The pace of change is what it is, and we need to develop new techniques to adapt – both commercially and sociologically. There is an enormous amount of time, effort, money and attention given to the former and not nearly enough to the latter.