In technology, it’s only a matter of time before a startup comes along and does what you do better, faster and cheaper.  As a technology company you need to build enough success with a product that produces strong cash flow to provide you the opportunity to find your next cash cow.  

That limited window of opportunity is one of the primary reasons Warren Buffet doesn’t like to invest in technology companies and it’s the same reason Google continues investing in a myriad of projects unrelated to its primary business.  It’s only a matter of time before they get disrupted in search and they find themselves fighting for survival.  The good technology startup entrepreneurs look at this constant change as part of the success formula and the great ones look to disrupt their own businesses before someone else does.

Here’s what we learned over a 15 year period in disrupting ourselves:

Make sure you’re in the right business
Our first business model was a failure. We launched our own online classified ads website during the dot com bust.  We couldn’t raise any investor money and the business wasn’t generating enough revenue for us to survive.  We quickly realized that we wouldn’t make it continuing solely down this path and that’s when we took our experience from developing our own website and began developing websites for others. Our first customer was a relative of our co-founder who was left hanging when their company’s Web developer disappeared without a trace.  We realized we could provide better customer service, be more reliable and gain business from our competitors and we needed the money so we took the work.

Very few startups pick the right business model, technology, employees, or for that matter, anything the first time.   Giving yourself the opportunity to experiment and fail will help you gain the experience necessary to discover where you can be successful and provide an opportunity to pivot quickly without shutting down the company.

To be successful and survive, we had to pivot from our initial business plan.  Since then, we’ve had to disrupt ourselves two more times and are already planning the third.

Change the way you monetize your product
We were successful with our model of selling websites for eight years, until the Great Recession of 2008 hit. At that time customers could no longer afford to spend $5k-$15k on their websites.

During the recession we introduced a website leasing program to finance our customers. This allowed them to get the features they needed affordably. Banks wouldn’t finance a website and customers didn’t have access to other credit during the credit crisis.  Making this change hurt because we no longer received a several thousand dollar payment up front making us take on a lot more risk and essentially give up our previous business model.

Fortunately, the leasing program was a big hit during the recession and we actually grew both revenues and profits during the downturn.

If you can find creative ways to sell your product such as making it ad supported or offering financing for it when others won’t, you can be successful even though it deviates from your traditional sales model.  You can also give away something you used to monetize providing an opportunity to monetize something more profitable.  Ex. Apple gives away it’s OS and applications to sell more hardware.

Very few startups pick the right business model, technology, employees, or for that matter, anything the first time.   Giving yourself the opportunity to experiment and fail will help you gain the experience necessary to discover where you can be successful and provide an opportunity to pivot quickly without shutting down the company.

In fact, we used this strategy a second time. As the economy healed people were no longer interested in signing up for long term commitments.  We learned that customers no longer wanted to finance anything.Instead they started reducing debt and high monthly payments.  Customers began paying for everything up front and wanted more competitive pricing or they would try to do it themselves to save money.

That’s when we decided to build their website for them for free.  As you can see, this effectively destroys our old business model.  We decided that the future of our business was not developing websites. It was providing a business solution and the form this takes is our product BannerOS. We charge monthly for BannerOS and build the website for customers for free to get people on board.

Giving away the website eliminates the initial cost or time required to build one yourself and we are doing this well ahead of our competition.

Develop a killer feature
Many of our competitors’ products lack any type of sophisticated data analytics that easily allow small business owners to see what’s happening with their website traffic to gain valuable insights and make informed strategic decisions about their business. We could have taken the simple route and told our customers to install Google Analytics, but we’d be on par with our competition.  Developing our own statistics comes at a price. We’re making a major investment in development when no one is forcing us.

We understand small businesses are going to have a hard time following the path of their website visitors.  Take the example of a customer visiting their website, registering for their newsletter, receiving an email, clicking through to a blog article, reading two other blog articles then clicking a link in one of the blogs to a product and making a purchase.  How can they make informed decisions on what to do if all systems are provided by separate vendors with their own separate reporting features? They wouldn’t be able to easily see the path their visitors took and make adjustments to their marketing efforts to improve results.

Small business owners don’t have the time and usually can’t afford big data scientists to analyze website visitors to help them maximize revenue across different platforms.  The potential insight small businesses can gain by using BannerOS is a competitive advantage over other offerings.

Is there a feature you can add to your product that simplifies the lives of your customers in a unique way even if they aren’t specifically requesting it?  Making the decision to invest resources that could disrupt other high priority items from getting done may allow you to find that one big thing that can be a driver of future growth for your company. 

For long term success, you have to actively look at objective ways to compete with yourself.  If you’re not looking for the next way to disrupt your own business, it’s only a matter of time before someone else does.

An edited copy of this article first appeared on entreprenuer.com. That article and portions of this article are copyright 2014 by Entrepreneur Media, Inc. All rights reserved.