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Ask HN: A web site that is vulnerable to a good competitor?
I have been thinking about how lots of successful web sites were late to the market, but were cheaper, or better designed. (stack overflow, plenty of fish, all the 37 signals products, etc.) Can you think of a site where a lean competitor could steal market share?
I have been thinking about survey monkey.
- klapinat0r 16y agoTVRage.com, or even TV.com, are both sites which are very good at certain points. TVRage mainly: having up-to-date episode listings. TV.com mainly: relevant news to the navigated page, extensive bio/episode description archive, respectively. Both sites have forums. Neither of which are particular active. TV.com's forum takes the lead in that area, however it seems the audience for tv-serie forums are located on fan-site forums instead. Both sites use userbased contributions (to some extend). TV.com seems more professionally handled (also endorsed, so obviously has an advantage), whereas TVRage summaries, bios etc., seem more random and not necessarily added to complete a show's info. Perhabs a better ranking/modding scheme could make for a TV.com/TVRage competitor? I haven't given it much thought, but taking something simple and easy to use like, say, up/down voting (which web users of today are familiar with) as an aid to moderate the info on the site could be an idea. An advantage of TVRage is it's open-ness and (willingness to have an) API. I've used this many times, and in a web-age where people want to present stuff at their own website how they want (kind of like a new-age "embedded link" or "widget"), APIs are a great way to show that your core speciality is information, and the accuracy of this, and if someone wants to present it in a blue/yellow website so be it, as long as people know where to go to get to the source: you.
- keiferski 16y agoWufoo (YC 06) is essentially a better designed Survey Monkey. http://www.wufoo.com http://www.wufoo.com
- andrewtbham 16y agoThat site does have great design... it's a little cartoonish, but well done. There are a lot of competitors in the space.
- dawson 16y agoMicrosoft HealthVault
- ig1 16y agoWell Plenty of Fish seems like a good target, bad design/UX makes it vulnerable Vault and eBay are another two examples. What these all have in common is requiring a critical mass of users to work, which gives them a barrier to entry that allows them to become complacent.