If you are inspired by stories about the good business practices behind phenomenally successful companies, then you must read “Five Lessons From the Netflix Startup Story.”
Here are some excerpts that remind me of the business philosophy in Atlas Shrugged:
Starting a new company takes a lot of persistence, positive thinking, and a never-say-die attitude. Many experienced people gave us long lists of reasons why our business idea wouldn’t succeed.
Why would people wait for movies to come in the mail when they could just go down the street to Blockbuster? How can you cost-effectively mail out movies? Won’t they get broken, stolen, or damaged? Seeing the negatives is always the easy part. Solving such problems requires a special kind of creative stubbornness.
Later in their story:
We had to build operations to create an exceptional customer experience (the “wow!”). To understand how the Post Office backend worked, I spent hundreds of hours at a few of the largest regional Postal Centers, observing and asking tons of questions.
I noticed letters being sorted by several high spinning circular drums. While these crushing metal drums enabled the separation and processing of over 40,000 standard size letters per hour, it was obvious that a thin plastic DVD would not survive the journey. With a sinking stomach, I felt the business idea slip away. But then I noticed a separate conveyor belt sorting magazines and other larger pieces of “flat mail.” How would I ensure that the package always used this flat mail machine and not the letter sorter?
Today the company’s value is twice that of Blockbuster.
Read the full article for more.