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To the extent that BCC was reliant on SEO and paid conversions... let's say you'd told someone the idea 6 months before you had availability to actually execute

by beambot 11y ago

To the extent that BCC was reliant on SEO and paid conversions... let's say you'd told someone the idea 6 months before you had availability to actually execute. Do you think the competitor could've established a beachhead? For example, they'd have 6 months' lead on SEO, and on the paid acquisition channels they'd have either (a) CPC and LTV data that you'd still be guessing on; and (b) the ability to keep your bids arbitrarily high while you're still spinning up. In other words: I think your sentiment is valid if you're both executing right now... but there's certainly some first-mover advantage.

patio11 11y ago
So the scenario is that on January 1st 2006 someone comes out of a time machine to a young programmer and says "Hello world plus a random number generator is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Believe it! Start your SEO engines now!" And that programmer actually starts competently executing on that, because time lords are known to be trusty, benevolent, and curiously forgetful of all the many, many more lucrative messages that could be sent given that opportunity? Then yes, that would have been problematic, I guess? The more meaningful question to me seems "Does BCC's modest success necessarily mean that the operators of pre-BCC competitors were worse off?" In the large, I'm thinking "Nope." DLTK Cards (no reason any of you would have heard of them, but its a mom-and-pop operation which does a variety of school printables, including bingo cards) is still up there and probably still worth several tens of thousands of dollars in AdSense revenue a year. (Might even be six figures.)
ams6110 11y ago
I think it would be unlikely. I remember the first time I heard about BCC. I could not believe anyone was making money from an idea like that. Bingo cards for teachers. Well, first of all teachers don't typically have a lot of spare money. They aren't generally thought of as spendthrifts. Many of them are already spending their own money on classroom supplies, and I'm supposed to get them to spend more? My thought would be that the only way to make money selling to educators is to sell to school districts. That sounds a lot like enterprise sales, only probably even more political. Doesn't seem like a very lucrative idea. So I don't think the idea would have appealed to very many people to begin with. Even fewer would have had the motivation to actually create the product and do the work to market it, and go through the effort of A/B testing idea after idea to figure out the best way to sell it. And even if they had, the world is a big place. No business has a lock on 100% of its market. The idea is something, but it's hardly the whole enchilada.

by beambot 11y ago

patio11 11y ago

So the scenario is that on January 1st 2006 someone comes out of a time machine to a young programmer and says "Hello world plus a random number generator is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Believe it! Start your SEO engines now!" And that programmer actually starts competently executing on that, because time lords are known to be trusty, benevolent, and curiously forgetful of all the many, many more lucrative messages that could be sent given that opportunity? Then yes, that would have been problematic, I guess? The more meaningful question to me seems "Does BCC's modest success necessarily mean that the operators of pre-BCC competitors were worse off?" In the large, I'm thinking "Nope." DLTK Cards (no reason any of you would have heard of them, but its a mom-and-pop operation which does a variety of school printables, including bingo cards) is still up there and probably still worth several tens of thousands of dollars in AdSense revenue a year. (Might even be six figures.)

ams6110 11y ago

I think it would be unlikely. I remember the first time I heard about BCC. I could not believe anyone was making money from an idea like that. Bingo cards for teachers. Well, first of all teachers don't typically have a lot of spare money. They aren't generally thought of as spendthrifts. Many of them are already spending their own money on classroom supplies, and I'm supposed to get them to spend more? My thought would be that the only way to make money selling to educators is to sell to school districts. That sounds a lot like enterprise sales, only probably even more political. Doesn't seem like a very lucrative idea. So I don't think the idea would have appealed to very many people to begin with. Even fewer would have had the motivation to actually create the product and do the work to market it, and go through the effort of A/B testing idea after idea to figure out the best way to sell it. And even if they had, the world is a big place. No business has a lock on 100% of its market. The idea is something, but it's hardly the whole enchilada.