Rocketboom was the first videoblog to roll out a daily show and build a large audience successfully.  As the first it commands a fairly permanent piece of popular consciousness around video blogs.  The hundreds and thousands of video blogs that came later will grow, prosper and fail in due course, but the first stands singularly and as such keeps a momentum that is incredibly valuable. Another example is Amazon.  Now in 2008, the Amazon business model could be repeated with the application of enough dollars.  They have established the generall model of a find anything online store.  But no one will be able to buy being the first and largest and thereforem most memorable find anything online store no matter how much they pay they'll always be just a copy cat.

The rocket boom model is at it's core a publicity or media model where you establish a a brand and broadcast it to the largest number of people that you possibly can and try to grab a differentiating and memorable presence.

The model counter point to this is to go out and buy a chicken, kill and fillet this chicken, roast it and some bread and sell it to someone for lunch.

This model is labor intensive and each successive chicken you buy is paid for by the margin you make from sweating previously adding value to the chicken.

If you are disciplined, every day you can improve your lunch menu and expand your sandwich selection.  Eventually, after many years, you may be able to buy your sandwich store altogether.  

At their core all businesses have to operate on the chicken model eventually.  In the fullness of time as with most things they have to make sense.  And in business sense is simply selling something for more than you buy it, by adding value to the thing you buy.  There is simply nothing more complicated than that to what any business must do.

In the short term however, timing plays an incredibly important role.  For the sandwich shop, for example, making only one sandwich a day is a disaster if someone opens a subway next door with every sandwich imaginable and you loose your one customer.  

But if you can keep your one customer, and then grow to two, as they say, you're still in business against Subway.

But there are two more big issues the chicken model business has to face, that relates to us here at SureTech.com.   The first is inventing the sandwich in the first place and the second is managing capital and expenditures.

For us the chicken meets rocketboom to some extent when we talk about delivering IT infrastructure services in a way that has never been done before to the extent we want to do it.  On the internet it is possible to do something, like a daily video blog, that has never been done before.   To the extent a sandwich could be invented for the first time and sold instantly in your whole town, there would be a great incentive to get out there with that invention for the whole town rather than patiently processing one chicken at a time until you can afford two chickens.