Caterina Fake (Flickr) about BizDev 2.0 Donnerstag, 17. August 2006, 13:48:02
BizDev 2.0Several companies -- probably more than a dozen -- have approached us to provide printing services for Flickr users, and while we were unable to respond to most of them, given the number of similar requests and other things eating up our time, one company, QOOP, just went ahead and applied for a Commercial API key, which was approved almost immediately, and built a fully-fleshed out service. Then after the fact, business development on our side got in touch, worked out a deal -- and the site was built and taking orders while their competitors were still waiting for us to return their emails. QOOP even patrols the discussions on the Flickr boards about their product, and responds and makes adjustments based on what they read there. Now that's customer service, and BizDev 2.0.
Traditional business development meant spending a lot of money on dry cleaning, animating your powerpoint, drinking stale coffee in windowless conference rooms and scouring the thesaurus looking for synonyms for "synergy". Not to mention trying to get hopelessly overbooked people to return your email. And then after the deal was done, squabbling over who dealt with the customer service. Much, much better this way!
I'm not a business genius, but I'm pretty sure sure this is not a new method of landing deals. It's just a method that seems to work well in a fast environment.