Friday, October 19, 2007
Thursday, October 4, 2007
On the Value of Reinventing the Wheel
When I tell people I'm working on a startup, they look up from their drinks with interest. When I tell them it's a personals site, they quickly loose interest, and we go back to staring at our drinks. Having read that last sentence, you likely feel the same way. "Hasn't that been done to death?" you're probably thinking. Well, yes, it has. But, if you ask me, as long as the underlying principle is sound, there is nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel.
Harry Partch, an innovator if ever there was one, invented an entirely new form of music which you almost certainly have never heard. On the other hand, Led Zepplin and the Rolling Stones appropriated the blues for the core of their sounds. Harry Partch died poor and largely unrecognized; thanks to medical science the Rolling Stones rock on.
That it is better to build on a solid foundation than to build anew is at least as true on the internet as it is in music. Just look at the ascension of the big social networks. The first social network most people ever heard of was Friendster. I still remember people asking me to "be my friendster." Friendster grew fast in virgin soil but, just as the Great Plains turned into the Dustbowl, it was quickly done in by its own success. Myspace improved upon Friendster in many ways, such as allowing people to festoon their profiles with any horrible thing they can imagine. However, Myspace was, and still is, a horribly executed spammers playground. So along comes Facebook, the social network to rule them all.
When social networks became the thing, everyone said that because it's all about making connections, the first social network to make it big would stay on top forever. Guys like Myspace and Facebook proved them wrong by regularly overhauling the social networking concept, growing the market as they went along. Had the Facebook developers felt like they had to be pioneers, they might have come up with something like Flooz.
Ill give you another example: Google. People have been building search engines since long before networks even existed. Google didn't have the advantage of being first, but the market was proven and would be growing as fast as the internet. They simply made good old search sexy. And, sure enough, in a relatively short time they dominated to the point that you no longer searched, you googled. They've continued to rework old technologies with their new projects, like giving the pre-web relic Usenet a usability facelift.
They call it the cutting edge for a reason. In the very likely event that your brilliant new idea doesn't make it, you'll get your head chopped off. Do a fixer-upper on an established idea like Google or the Stones and you've got a better chance of being the next Microsoft than by pioneering like, uh, Microsoft.
So I ask you reconsider my little project. The market for personals already exists. How many startups can say that they are going into a market where they know for a fact that individual users will pay upwards of $30 per month for their product? Yes the market is saturated, but by low rent players using canned scripts, many who's main business is running porno toplists. Easy prey. A better mousetrap could quickly consolidate existing users, as well as bring in users who were never comfortable with personals before.
A favorite economics professor of mine once told a story of a wise businessman who proudly proclaimed he had never been first in anything, and that's why he's rich. The story was boring but the lesson is sound: let someone create the market for you, let someone else make all the beginners mistakes so you don't have to pay for them.
Harry Partch, an innovator if ever there was one, invented an entirely new form of music which you almost certainly have never heard. On the other hand, Led Zepplin and the Rolling Stones appropriated the blues for the core of their sounds. Harry Partch died poor and largely unrecognized; thanks to medical science the Rolling Stones rock on.
That it is better to build on a solid foundation than to build anew is at least as true on the internet as it is in music. Just look at the ascension of the big social networks. The first social network most people ever heard of was Friendster. I still remember people asking me to "be my friendster." Friendster grew fast in virgin soil but, just as the Great Plains turned into the Dustbowl, it was quickly done in by its own success. Myspace improved upon Friendster in many ways, such as allowing people to festoon their profiles with any horrible thing they can imagine. However, Myspace was, and still is, a horribly executed spammers playground. So along comes Facebook, the social network to rule them all.
When social networks became the thing, everyone said that because it's all about making connections, the first social network to make it big would stay on top forever. Guys like Myspace and Facebook proved them wrong by regularly overhauling the social networking concept, growing the market as they went along. Had the Facebook developers felt like they had to be pioneers, they might have come up with something like Flooz.
Ill give you another example: Google. People have been building search engines since long before networks even existed. Google didn't have the advantage of being first, but the market was proven and would be growing as fast as the internet. They simply made good old search sexy. And, sure enough, in a relatively short time they dominated to the point that you no longer searched, you googled. They've continued to rework old technologies with their new projects, like giving the pre-web relic Usenet a usability facelift.
They call it the cutting edge for a reason. In the very likely event that your brilliant new idea doesn't make it, you'll get your head chopped off. Do a fixer-upper on an established idea like Google or the Stones and you've got a better chance of being the next Microsoft than by pioneering like, uh, Microsoft.
So I ask you reconsider my little project. The market for personals already exists. How many startups can say that they are going into a market where they know for a fact that individual users will pay upwards of $30 per month for their product? Yes the market is saturated, but by low rent players using canned scripts, many who's main business is running porno toplists. Easy prey. A better mousetrap could quickly consolidate existing users, as well as bring in users who were never comfortable with personals before.
A favorite economics professor of mine once told a story of a wise businessman who proudly proclaimed he had never been first in anything, and that's why he's rich. The story was boring but the lesson is sound: let someone create the market for you, let someone else make all the beginners mistakes so you don't have to pay for them.
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