Last night I saw BlackBerry, a movie about the BlackBerry smart phone. It was brilliant, one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. My wife, whose main criteria for liking a movie (even one about Canadian nerds making gadgets) is how much romantic heroism it has, agreed. Go see it.1
Here are some things I thought about after sleeping on it.
Working with people you don’t truly know is really really hard
(Spoiler alert, but also you already know how this movie ends, that’s not the fun part.)
The first half of BlackBerry shows how Mike and Jim lean in to their respective character quirks to make the best phone in the world. Mike is a brilliant, meticulous, perfectionist engineer. He’ll only build a prototype if it’s exactly right, until Jim convinces him to do one in a night:
Jim is an aggressive and determined salesman, who is willing to make sacrifices. He spends a lot of time yelling at Mike about how badly he runs his business, while behind the scenes taking out a mortgage while unemployed so that Mike can make payroll.
Both Mike and Jim find a way to stick to what they are great at, and they seem to find perfect overlap just where they are weakest. Through this partnership, they build a $20B business.
The guys are very very different, and it’s hard to believe they actually like each other. One of the ways that Mike and Jim are able to work together so successfully is by staying very far out of each other’s way. For every possible problem that arises, it’s totally obvious (to them) who is responsible for it. The other person has complete trust it will get resolved, while being totally oblivious to the details. For situations that seem like they could be a crisis, but ultimately turn out to be minor (like the big outage midway through the film), this system works very well.
In the second half we learn that the separation of powers that worked so well when there was a clear path to success, works very badly when a big enough problem comes along. There’s a really pivotal scene where Jim asks Mike’s opinion of the iPhone for the first time, and you can see him just think “oh, we’re fucked”. But because the two guys can’t really work together - they never truly have - they are never able to respond in a cohesive way. At its peak BlackBerry had 45% market share. Today it has 0%.
I think it’s common companies grow for founders/executives/leaders/etc to create more separation and trust. “I trust you’ll take care of X and Y, and I won’t even have an opinion on it because you own it.” When you’re just 4 people in a room starting out, nobody would ever say such a thing, but in a big enough company that’s the correct corporate speak.
That works well for issues that can be confined to a single department. If the problem is just in sales techniques, it isn’t helpful for the head of finance to chime in.
But when a threat is existential - or even just when it needs to be solved by more than one unrelated team - it’s very very hard to respond to it well without strong cohesion at the top. And I think this is one of the reasons BlackBerry (the company) struggled.
Marketing is downstream of business model
The BlackBerry phone became the most popular phone in the world, and a status symbol for the business elite, through incredible viral growth. Endorsements from Oprah and use across boardrooms went a long way. But this worked particularly well because phones derive their value from the size of the network; the more people have one, the more everyone benefits from having one (Metcalfe’s Law). 2 key features amplified this for the BlackBerry:
It made it easy to send emails while away from your desk. This meant a lot more work emails got sent. If you didn’t have a BlackBerry you’d quickly end up very behind on email; this gave you a strong incentive to buy one.
BBM, or as Jim describes it in the movie, “free instant messaging, only on BlackBerry”. Just like iMessage did 10 years later, this made the BlackBerry network much more useful every time another person bought one.
These features acted as powerful moats, and as powerful growth drivers. They made BlackBerry the best phone in the world, and they gave owners a strong incentive to refer friends and colleagues.
By contrast, the BlackBerry movie has not gone so well, despite incredible reviews.
This isn’t surprising, because nobody’s heard of this movie! Did they even do any marketing? Turns out, not doing any marketing and relying purely on word of mouth doesn’t work as well for a movie as it does for a phone. I can tell you to go and see it, and if you do then we can talk about it, but it doesn’t really change my experience. And unless I plan on watching this movie every month2, it doesn’t give me an incentive to keep referring people to it for the next decade.
Unless you get very very lucky or have a business model that has inherent virality built in (and get lucky), a good formula to remember is:
(great product + no sales/marketing = no revenue)
This isn’t a big insight, except I see companies make this mistake all the time in the SaaS world. The most common framing is “we’re going to focus on making it really easy for customers to sign up and buy the product themselves”. Every developer and designer’s wet dream is a fully self-service product, where customers will create and an account and enter a credit card to spend thousands of dollars per year (or more) without ever talking to a human. The reality is you can count on two hands the number of software products in the world that achieve this. And none of them got there just by having a nice onboarding flow.
If you put all your eggs in the basket of self service, your product needs to be extremely simple, extremely cheap, and extremely viral. Solving a complex business problem with software is hard enough without also trying to meet those criteria.
The 90s and early 2000s had the best music
Honestly this movie’s soundtrack is so good. Go see it just for that.
Honestly, I might.