Amazon's Growth Strategy

There are many interesting analysis and theories about the legendary company Amazon. One of my personal favourites is Why Amazon is eating the world. In the article, the author described Amazon’s strategy of externalizing its internal operations as platforms to the public:

Essentially, what Amazon does is to convert its internal tools, solutions, or operations into a public-facing platform, so that it can quickly improve them through a feedback loop and increase its efficiency through competition. Here are a few examples:

• AWS: Amazon open up its internal infrastructure technology into an external product
• Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA): third-party sellers can use Amazon’s fulfillment center to handle inventory, shipping orders, and returns
• Connect: a self-service, cloud-based contact center platform that is based on the same technology used in Amazon’s own call centers.

Amazon is using this strategy to successively revolutionize itself and thrive through fierce market competition. 

Externalization as a Strategy for Personal Growth

This strategy can be extended beyond a company and benefited you in personal growth. Essentially, you can convert your personal pursuit or hobby into a public work, so that you can quickly improve your skillsets and boost your growth through continuous feedback from the public. This idea comes from my personal experience:

• I have been very interested in the research and application of Machine Learning algorithms. Now I am working as a Data Engineer in Shopify to embed machine learning technology into our products. This work exposes me to lots of challenges from the design, implementation to optimization of the ML algorithms. It pushes me to continuously improve my skillsets and fulfill me with abundant practical experiences in machine learning. 
• I am always very attentive to the news and trends in technology and economics. Since summer 2017, I have been working as a part-time industry analyst for Synced Review, a media entity with an exclusive focus on machine intelligence. I wrote commentary and reports on companies, technologies, and trends in the industry, and continuously received feedbacks from the team. It pushes me to read more and think deeper: I need to make observations and create analysis to the depth that I have never reached before the work.
• There are many other examples: blog-writing, photography, do paid-research, making open-sourced projects, etc.

By externalizing your personal pursuits and hobbies into public-facing works, you can receive motivations, feedbacks, and even critics that are all essential to push you to relentlessly focus your resources (efforts, time) into the area, polish your skillsets, and receive fast personal growth. This is not necessarily about finding a paid full-time job. More important is to create outputs to the public and build up a feedback loop. As individuals, we all have limitations, weaknesses, and biases, introducing the public audition to our work help us to leverage the power and intelligence from the public to improve ourselves. 

Challenges

Get it Started

Why Amazon can successfully implement the externalization strategy in so many of its products, but others cannot? One of the major reason is Amazon’s well-known relentlessness of investing in the long term. That’s the same for individuals. Externalizing your personal pursuits and hobbies requires determination and braveness to get it started. You need continuous commitment and consistent outputs to keep the work running. Before you start, think of your long-term goals. Consider the externalization as an approach to help you to achieve your goals faster and more efficiently, instead of a work to be done. That will give you enough motivation and confidence to get it started.

Overcome the Limitation

One of the main difference between Amazon and you is the scalability: Amazon is relentless in expansion and can virtually hire an unlimited amount of staff as well as machines to fulfill its ambitions. As an individual, you are subject to the limitation fo 24/7 in time, and cannot focus on multiple works at a time. There are a few ways to overcome the limitation:

• Leverage the technology to do automation and save your time. There are abundant Software-as-a-Service tools to save you from building the wheels: you can build up a well-designed online store in a few hours with Shopify; you can easily create an email subscription system with MailChimp; you can. All of these technologies can save your time to build a fundation, so that you can focus on the most critical contents. 
• Collaborate/Recruit: the rising of social media breaks down the barriers between individuals and move people who shared the same hobbies closer. Find out the people who share the similar interests with you and collaborate through externalization. You can form a design studio, a book club, a band, or an organization, so that everyone’s time and advantages can be combined together. Then you can scale up your outputs. 

Find the Right Approach

As I mentioned above, it is not necessary to find a paid full-time job. Thankfully we are seeing more and more marketplace and on-demand platforms coming up: Medium is building a platform to reward and incentivize blog writers to share their articles; 500px is building a platform for photographers to find on-demand work as well as sell their photos; there are many freelancer websites where demands are aggregated and you can find a way to externalize your outputs. There are abundant options for your to externalize your work, so find the approach you feel comfortable with, and make commitments to it.