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TechInAfrica — Talking about tech startups, the hype is one of the factors that form your product’s success. It is not just about the product but also about the attention you get from the PR. A lot of founders spend a good amount of their time jumping from one newsroom to another just to build up the hype.
Aiming to create a buzz, tech founders have adopted a subset of adjectives that they think best describes their startup. However, these adjectives have ended up just being words that founders use to excite investors, rather than actually live up to these descriptions.
Here are some of the most misused adjectives in the tech startup scene:
Disruptive
According to Wikipedia, disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market-leading firms, products, and alliances.
Often times, this adjective is used correctly. However, some startups that merely introduce good PR to an already existing business model go shouting how disruptive they are when in true essence, they just have a marketing budget that local entrepreneurs did not have.
Revolutionary
Revolutionary refers to something that has a major, sudden impact on society or on some aspect of human endeavor. The best example of revolutionary innovation is M-PESA.
But there are not many startups that are revolutionary when they still have poorly codded app with bugs.
Innovative
This adjective is tricky but innovation is the coming up of a new idea or the application of a new process to an already existing problem. In reality, just a few startups actually came up with a new idea.
Startups that people know that plaster “innovative” all over their marketing as just vibandas that are glorified.
AI-Powered
The latest craze in the startup scene seems to be the development of AI-powered products, whether it is customer care bots or something else crazy. In the real sense, most of this AI-powered stuff is just hard-coded bots that give predefined responses to a set of questions that are expected beforehand.
Source: gadgets-africa.com
