It is of no doubt that Amazon’s journey has been one that gives a lot of entrepreneurial impetus to aspiring businesses and startups all over the world.
Amazon’s journey has not just been such that beams consistency, but also of innovation and the constant desire to place customer’s needs ahead of every intended innovation. The company’s rich history surely has a tale many should learn from.
Amazon’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos with an estimated net worth of about $185 billion highlighted the company’s journey from a mere online bookshop whose employees’ first work desk was made from wooden doors. According to him, the firm got a turn around to become ‘the everything store’ following an email forwarded to a thousand random people asking their opinion about what they’d like to see Amazon sell.
“I emailed 1,000 randomly selected customers and asked them, ‘Besides the things we sell today, what would you like to see us sell?’” Bezos said in a 2018 interview at the Economic Club of Washington. Per the responses obtained from these exercises, Bezos figured that “the way they answered the question was whatever they were looking for at that moment.” and that exactly was what Bezos did.
“That’s when I thought to myself, We can sell anything this way,” Bezos said at the talk. “So then we launched electronics and toys and many other categories over time.” Today, there is hardly anything anyone needs from an online store that one cannot get from Amazon depicting a calculated and determined way to serve everyone irrespective of their needs.
Lessons From Amazon’s Journey
Amazon undoubtedly reinvented the capabilities of the then-novel world wide web with his e-commerce business. With the Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN) flagship online retailing store, the company has delved into other businesses with investments in space companies (Blue Origins).
Another major lesson to learn fro Amazon’s journey is that the custodian of a great idea should not fail to communicate such to people who have the capabilities to help him fulfill the dreams/ideas.
In his 1999 letter to shareholders, Bezos shared his vision to use Amazon’s platform to build “Earth’s most customer-centric company, a place where customers can come to find and discover anything and everything they might want to buy online.”
“We’ll listen to customers, invent on their behalf, and personalize the store for each of them, all while working hard to continue to earn their trust,” he wrote. “Each new product and service we offer makes us more relevant to a wider group of customers and can increase the frequency with which they visit our store.”
The entirety of Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s journey was not without trials, errors, and failures but obviously, that did not deter him from pressing to where he has gotten to today. A reality that must dawn on everyone aspiring to be a Bezos today.