3 ms·

>But of late, I have realised that this is simply not true. why not?

wwalser 10y ago
The theory is that building something and turning it into a company are wildly divergent things. Yes, someone could copy your idea and implementation. But are they going to dedicate themselves to this full time for a year like it took you before you reached a poverty level income? Are they going to cold call 10 people per day for three months? Are they going to learn to write, nurture a following of people and provide content and value to those people in the hopes that <5% convert to customers? Anyone who starts by copying an idea probably doesn't have the same drive to make the idea successful. The actual trouble isn't that transparency invites competition. The trouble is competition that already exists somehow using the transparency against you. Numbers, to me, don't seem like the type of thing that an outsider could use against you. Effective marketing tactics and growth hacks on the other hand can be gold.
- formula_ninguna 10y ago
  Interesting. What does "The trouble is competition that already exists somehow using the transparency against you." mean, how does it use the transparency against me?
  - wwalser 10y ago
    Yeah, sure thing: I've seen it happen a few times mostly with companies whose founders I listen to regularly on podcasts. It's almost always tactical growth advice, something that every startup struggles to find early on. Where are our customers hanging out, consuming content, how do we engender trust with them etc. Basically a founder says something like "We've recently discovered that paying a couple of talented designers to re-purpose our blog content as SlideShare presentations works surprisingly well for." Companies have tried SlideShare as a means of creating additional distribution around their content marketing. It works for some and doesn't for others. It's basically target market dependent. Some markets have bloggers/curators who will pick up the Slideshare content and embed it on their site. Other target markets don't attach to that kind of content. So, this founder shares this (and keep in mind Slideshare is just an example, it could be any marketing tactic) and the week after his podcast is released their largest competitor starts publishing content on Slideshare. Maybe their marketing team just decided to run an experiment? If the same thing happens three more times? Eventually that founder is going to start doing a cost-benefit analysis of this particular brand of transparency. He could continue sharing some stuff, their MRR and ARR seem like fair game to me but he probably wants to hold back on being specific about growth tactics.
    - formula_ninguna 10y ago
      why do they share that advice then? to disinform their competitors?

The theory is that building something and turning it into a company are wildly divergent things. Yes, someone could copy your idea and implementation. But are they going to dedicate themselves to this full time for a year like it took you before you reached a poverty level income? Are they going to cold call 10 people per day for three months? Are they going to learn to write, nurture a following of people and provide content and value to those people in the hopes that <5% convert to customers? Anyone who starts by copying an idea probably doesn't have the same drive to make the idea successful. The actual trouble isn't that transparency invites competition. The trouble is competition that already exists somehow using the transparency against you. Numbers, to me, don't seem like the type of thing that an outsider could use against you. Effective marketing tactics and growth hacks on the other hand can be gold.

formula_ninguna 10y ago
Interesting. What does "The trouble is competition that already exists somehow using the transparency against you." mean, how does it use the transparency against me?
- wwalser 10y ago
  Yeah, sure thing: I've seen it happen a few times mostly with companies whose founders I listen to regularly on podcasts. It's almost always tactical growth advice, something that every startup struggles to find early on. Where are our customers hanging out, consuming content, how do we engender trust with them etc. Basically a founder says something like "We've recently discovered that paying a couple of talented designers to re-purpose our blog content as SlideShare presentations works surprisingly well for." Companies have tried SlideShare as a means of creating additional distribution around their content marketing. It works for some and doesn't for others. It's basically target market dependent. Some markets have bloggers/curators who will pick up the Slideshare content and embed it on their site. Other target markets don't attach to that kind of content. So, this founder shares this (and keep in mind Slideshare is just an example, it could be any marketing tactic) and the week after his podcast is released their largest competitor starts publishing content on Slideshare. Maybe their marketing team just decided to run an experiment? If the same thing happens three more times? Eventually that founder is going to start doing a cost-benefit analysis of this particular brand of transparency. He could continue sharing some stuff, their MRR and ARR seem like fair game to me but he probably wants to hold back on being specific about growth tactics.
  - formula_ninguna 10y ago
    why do they share that advice then? to disinform their competitors?