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I attended a startup seminar where speakers were founders from highly successful startups. Their advice was: "First imitate and then innovate". It is a usual b
by ketanb 16y ago
I attended a startup seminar where speakers were founders from highly successful startups. Their advice was: "First imitate and then innovate". It is a usual business practice to first copy what's working for others, then innovate to make it better and leave the competition behind. It makes sense specially in a web industry where it takes very little time to catchup with competition. Companies have to keep innovating to keep an edge over imitators. Web industry doesn't have number 2 concept. It is either number 1 or out of business. I think not having room for number 2 is what is forcing companies to copy others work and kill the competition.
- jarek 16y agoThere are a ton of number twos and threes on the internet. Quick sample: Bing, Yahoo!, Tagged...
- ketanb 16y agoIf we look at sites like Facebook or Linked-in or any company building social websites/applications chances of finding number 2 is less. I haven't heard any Linked-In or Facebook competitor. We do see number 2 like Bing, Yahoo etc because they are not startups. Bing is funded by Microsoft and Yahoo was number 1 sometime in the past and has enough money to self-sustain for a while. How long Yahoo will survive?
- jarek 16y agoTagged is a number three, not owned by a large corporation, not a previous giant. When it comes to social networking, network effects normally result in one or two highly visible giants and a long tail of smaller, likely specialized networks. These can still be profitable, and of course there's more to the web and startups than stuff that is social in nature.