3 ms·

No-one understood our idea, but now it's worth over $1bn

8 points by tablet 7y ago

throwGuardian 7y ago
How are such meteoric valuations for companies with relatively smaller moats (Airtable, slack, etc.) justified? Why can't Microsoft/Apple/Google throw $20M/annum in OpEx, clone these products and flood the sales channels these upstarts are going for?
- tablet 7y ago
  It is not as easy as you think. Take Slack. Atlassian failed to compete with its Stride alternative and cooperated with Slack instead. Microsoft Teams maybe a more viable alternative, but it's still less user friendly than Slack and it is remain to be seen who will win. Money does not decide everything, you have to un-burden a department or run internal startup. This is hard and too few companies are doing it in a good way (Valve?).
- milesvp 7y ago
  There’s sort of a lifecycle for applications. Early on your userbase needs one set of features/UI and later, as your userbase matures and gains experience both with your product and the applications space, feature needs and UI requirements change. This leaves room ‘at the bottom’ for a company to come in, offer a small set of features and take some marketshare of maybe the less sophisticated users. What stops an entrenched player from simply copying these impinging apps is a couple if things. First it’s really hard to make a product for multiple market segments. You either have to make big UI compromises, or have some way to modify the UI as users gain sophistication. The programmer solution, looking at open source software, seems to always be to add yet another config/preference option. This sort of works, but now you also need to advertise and educate around this option. Second, and probably more important for comapanies though, is that they are almost universally incapable of supporting products that are intended to canabalize their own products. This is particularly problematic when the second product is meant to take low margin customers. Most businesses would prefer to spend the effort on attracting and converting high margin customers, while shedding low margin customers. It’s the classic business school story of how to undermine the steel industry: focus on rebar first. since no mill wants to make such a low value item, they will literally subcontract work to you, allowing you to gain traction in the industry, and then you can slowly improve your offerings.

8 points by tablet 7y ago

How are such meteoric valuations for companies with relatively smaller moats (Airtable, slack, etc.) justified? Why can't Microsoft/Apple/Google throw $20M/annum in OpEx, clone these products and flood the sales channels these upstarts are going for?

tablet 7y ago
It is not as easy as you think. Take Slack. Atlassian failed to compete with its Stride alternative and cooperated with Slack instead. Microsoft Teams maybe a more viable alternative, but it's still less user friendly than Slack and it is remain to be seen who will win. Money does not decide everything, you have to un-burden a department or run internal startup. This is hard and too few companies are doing it in a good way (Valve?).
milesvp 7y ago
There’s sort of a lifecycle for applications. Early on your userbase needs one set of features/UI and later, as your userbase matures and gains experience both with your product and the applications space, feature needs and UI requirements change. This leaves room ‘at the bottom’ for a company to come in, offer a small set of features and take some marketshare of maybe the less sophisticated users. What stops an entrenched player from simply copying these impinging apps is a couple if things. First it’s really hard to make a product for multiple market segments. You either have to make big UI compromises, or have some way to modify the UI as users gain sophistication. The programmer solution, looking at open source software, seems to always be to add yet another config/preference option. This sort of works, but now you also need to advertise and educate around this option. Second, and probably more important for comapanies though, is that they are almost universally incapable of supporting products that are intended to canabalize their own products. This is particularly problematic when the second product is meant to take low margin customers. Most businesses would prefer to spend the effort on attracting and converting high margin customers, while shedding low margin customers. It’s the classic business school story of how to undermine the steel industry: focus on rebar first. since no mill wants to make such a low value item, they will literally subcontract work to you, allowing you to gain traction in the industry, and then you can slowly improve your offerings.