COMMENTS
Google started as a "me too" search engine and look at them now.
I guess the secret is to offer something the bigger players can't or won't.
Thought provoking post. I am launching my startup this month, but when I started developing it the market wasn't that crowded, in fact there were maybe 2-3 competitors, now that’s grown to around 8 that I know of. But what keeps me going forward with my idea is that I believe I have a better product. Like you said “Yes, there are competitors, but nobody has built a product yet that users really like…”. Now I know its easy for me to say that I have a better product because its my "baby" and your baby is always the prettiest, but if you truly believe in something...go for it.
Great post.
I'm wondering if starting up a "me too" company could be considered a viable business strategy as long as you really understood what the guy who came first did wrong.
If they solved a really tough problem, but turn new features out too slowly, then you could focus on beating them by just being faster.
Likewise, if they move quickly and are smart but are missing something in their offering, you could beat them by being a little more imaginative.
I wrote about this in a blog post yesterday (sorry about the shameless link here), but I really do think these two ideas are connected.
Thanks for those that have commented already.
Also, in re-reading my article, I discovered that I have not yet really looked at the advantages of being a "me too" company. I had planned to do that, but the article got too long, so I saved it for a future post.
Will revisit and provide a (hopefully) deeper analysis in the follow-up.
Even if the first-to-market companies also lead the market and have happy customers, the me-too strategy can work. Twice at my last venture-backed startup I saw our team sieze the lead in their markets, only to have the bizdev opportunities (OEMs and acquisitions) "stolen" by smaller, younger companies that had cloned the 80% of our product the market seemed to like best. With equivalent-seeming products and a much lower revenue multiple valuation, the followers had an easier time closing deals.
There wouldn't of had been a MySpace or FaceBook if they didn't say "me too" after the Friendster buzz. Not many talk about Friendster but people will remember MySpace for a long time. So I would also recommend people to always look for an opportunity to say "me too" but "a little better than you". If you can twist any idea then you can always go for it.
-Guna
As a 'me too' startup, it has many distinct advantages:
a. its has the second mover advantage (market has been validated i.e. users need such a product, enough mistakes made, pitfalls avoided);
b. can concentrate on the experience instead of technology
c. can compete against a benchmark; or has a rough direction already in place
Um . . . iPod? iPhone? How much more of a "me-too" market could you want than (yawn) music players and cell-phones. But if everyone hates their cell phone, then "unsatisfied cell phone users" is a HUGE unserved market despite all the competitors that think they're in that space. Everyone's excited about the iPhone because of how well Apple served the people that hated their music players.
In the next 20 years, there will probably be at least 10 superstar startup success stories where the startup's claim-to-fame will be some new formulation of the tired old technologies of e-mail, search engines or video.
Microsoft wanted to write software like atari did but just not for games. I guess they figured that by dominating every piece of computing hardware with thier os would be better then creating great software for just one particular vendor...and and a company was yet to create an OS that home and business users really liked - thats probably still true to this day.
"Me too" .... It's competition, simply put. If someone is running a successful business, someone else will want a piece of the pie and create a competing service.
I would even say that it is very smart to enter a marketplace where we already know people spend their money. Being an innovator is much more risky and dangerous than trying to compete and learning from the errors of the originators.
It's only on the Internet where people think you are a copycat or a plagorist if you want to compete. If I open a dry cleaning shop down the street, nobody would say anything except maybe, "oh good, a dry cleaners close to home."
Since there is no "close to home" on the Internet competing services are often times based on slight feature enhancements, differences or levels of support.
Were you at the last WebInno, and did you come talk to us at the Mobatalk table?
Jeff: I was at the last WebInno meeting, and no I didn't visit any of the side-dish tables. I'm way too introverted for that.
I generally lurk in a corner during these things, watch the presentations, talk to a few people that I know and then leave.
Very great and motivational post.It'll really help youngsters to decide competition strategy and how to add competitiveadvantages to there services over existing one.
Cant help thinking of Michael Porters thinking on differentiation plus the rule of three. Every industry has place for 3 big profitable players. ( again there is a book on this as well)
There are too many web apps. Too many passwords, usernames, sites to do one thing. What if I have to do 5 things online, that is 5 sites to visit, 5 passwords with 5 usernames.
If on average, a person only visits 5 to 7 web sites in their daily routine, give me a reason why you should be one of them. I suppose that is why there are aggregators--but guess what, these are too complicated for most folks. But certainly, I do like the usability and appearance of mypunchbowl, but more than likely I will only use it maybe twice before I forget about it.
I won't mind getting a site that will visit all my sites with all my banking needs, shopping, news, blogs, credit cards, so all i have to click on is what i want to do and everything else is on that single site. Is this a "me too" problem? I don't know of such solution out there.
Nice post, got me thinking of my frustrations with all these "me too" sites.
It hink the critical thing is to to follow the *customer* and not the competitors. That's a good lesson regardless of whether there is 1 competitor or 20.
Companies often go wrong trying to watch the competitor, rather than the customer.
If you're a "me too" company because you see XYZ, Inc. doing something and you think you can do better, that doesn't bode well for your success.
I agree with the last comment. Don't be suckered into a feature war, but be aware of what competitors offer because they are likely just responding to feedback and requests from their customers.
Background Check Please
=========================
Checkout the background of each "Me-To" startup success STORIES, you will see a strange coincidence, all of them are owned/controlled by members of a particular 2% minority community.
So if you are not a member of "2% minority community" who has "money from thin air" access to financing from control of the Fed reserve, major Banks and Vulture Capital firms, don't waste your time with a "Me-To" startup it will fail.......... Only way to beat the system is to start your own "Me-To" Fed Reserve, Banks......... think.......
As one of the Co-Founders of DotNetNuke Corp (along with Nik Kalyani, Shaun Walker and Scott Willhite) I have certainly come to understand why people shy away from me too companies. However, in our case, being in the Open Source realm has allowed us to really focus on customers. This has made it so much easier when talking with potential investors to get past the me too label. Being able to show strong continued growth in a "crowded market" goes a long way towards disproving the label. You would think that the CMS/Portal category was long played out but I think we have proven that wrong.
I think in many cases when people think that a market is overcrowded it is only because their sense of the size of the market is skewed too low. Maybe in many of these cases, the market is just way bigger than anyone imagined, and is just waiting for a "MySpace" to come along and show everyone just how big the market really is.
Good article. I tried and liked Matt's site.
On me too: My last company managed all the paid search marketing for Match.com- "several" million dollars a year for Google & Yahoo. The suprising thing to me was that Match.com is clearly the leader in online dating but was fighting it out for clicks everyday with a ton of other dating sites. One is a local Boston company
www.singlesnet.com that does very well. Not being in the dating game (sorry ladies) I had never heard of them before but with a good site and tight management of search/conversion metrics they built a nice business.
Business schools and VCs tout first mover advantage but I always think of the McDonalds - Burger King example. McDonalds had a huge team of real estate and traffic analysts do tons of research before choosing their locations. Burger King just located their restaurants near McDonalds.
A fast follower/me too strategy will only last so long assuming some success. At some point you will have to lead and innovate to surpass the company you have been following. Thoughts?
Mike, I think you are spot on. As I commented above, I think there's nothing inherently wrong with being a "me too" company. Too many entrepreneurs are afraid of competition, when competition can actually be a good thing, because it can help validate your business. Excellent McDonald's / Burger King example!
You are right, I think in saying that at some point you'll have to innovate to surpass the company. That's true. In the Burger King example, McDonald's was really good at choosing real estate locations, and I'm willing to bet that Burger King was really good at quickly putting up a new restaurant. McDonald's had the smarts, Burger King had speed.
In that example, did Burger King eventually do anything different to surpass McDonald's?
"we did talk about was how hard it was to find great technical people to join an idea-stage company"
Entrepreneur works hard
Technical person works hard
Entrepreneur creates business value
Technical person creates business vale
Entrepreneur gets 99%
Techical person gets 1% (maybe)
Talk AIN'T cheap, Engineering IS.
we started out in '99 when we had nearly no competition! now there are millions but we are still going strong with our particular business model.
As usual, another excellent post and a belated thanks for the co-founder post of a few weeks ago.
@Mark C: hard to believe your story. The dearth of technical talent is such that a person with web software skills can write their own check. Maybe you have to move out to the SF Bay Area.
It's easy to see why little me too sites can survive and thrive against the big players. Big sites have Big dev teams, Big marketing, and Big process. They can never turn the boat fast enough to catch the latest trends as they happen.
I compete in the Travel Blogging space, and I've been watching these Big sites burning through millions trying to get a simple Google Maps interface up an running. One host has even ditched their expensive looking custom map interface for a clunky looking, hastilly cobbled together GMap with a few pins stuck in it.
In a few months, Google will release a Flash port of the API, and these big companies will have start steering their giant teams in the new direction. Meanwhile us small guys will have a new version out inside of a week.
Small companies don't succeed because post 2001 net crash most successful internet companies are run by the same people who run the "Fed Reserve, Banks, Newspapers, TV stations. 1) They print money from thin air, we have to work our ass of to gather some capital or pay interest to them 2)They have access to free publicity through mainstream media, we have to pay for advertisements to them 3) They control most large data centers, your algorithm you took 2 years to perfect sits on their machine! Shhh.... don't tell anyone. 4) The only way to succeed in this corrupt environment is to start "Us Too" Fed Reserve, "Us Too" Banks, "Us Too" Newspapers/TV to serve your community then think of capturing WWW market...... think.............
I've been developing yet another "me too" start-up for last 2 months (nothing global, just a city oriented site in Russian language), and your post hit exactly on main spots I stumbled upon -
1) "The reason is that nobody had really solved the problem quite right" - too true! I studied numerous competitors' sites and almost all of them seem to be dead by now, and I seem to know what to do to revive the idea - in a word, for my project,it's to flip focus from shops to customers.
2) "how hard it was to find great technical people to join an idea-stage company" - sad, but too true, too :( I'm not a tech guy, either, and it hurts to see my partner, the programmer, to pay considerably less attention to the project than I do - I've got a feeling that it might be too late now to lunch the site, I should have done than early January :(
Thanks for the post.
Wow! The energy generated in an enterpreneur in this article is immense, more so by the numerous inputs from a variety of contributors. Thanks a lot, publisher.
Hi Dharmesh
Just a little late in finding this post (I was led here by a businessweek mention). Did you guys find any solutions for the "how hard it was to find great technical people to join an idea-stage company" dilemma? I'm in the same shoes as Matt was, in that I am a business guy and not a software developer.
Thought provoking post. I am launching my startup this month, but when I started developing it the market wasn't that crowded, in fact there were maybe 2-3 competitors, now that’s grown to around 8 that I know of. But what keeps me going forward with my idea is that I believe I have a better product. Like you said “Yes, there are competitors, but nobody has built a product yet that users really like…”. Now I know its easy for me to say that I have a better product because its my "baby" and your baby is always the prettiest, but if you truly believe in something...go for it. Great post.
I was looking for an Indian site that can combine news, movies, cricket and also social networking aspects such as user points, forums, blogs, private messages etc. I stumbled upon
http://www.hangoutwith.com and found to be great! Hangoutwith.com is a good social networking site especially for Indians and it is much cleaner than other sites such as orkut, tagged etc. It has news,videos,cricket news/videos,bollywood news/videos and much more!
Give it a spin!
Now I know its easy for me to say that I have a better product because its my "baby" and your baby is always the prettiest, but if you truly believe in something...go for it. Great post.
It seems like you should have kept this new theme closed-source until a couple of weeks before the 5.0 launch... (don't know if that was possible at all?) However, I definitely feel it's not drupal that made a mistake here, but the wordpress team.
Wonderful Article i enjoyed reading it, thanks for with us!
Great and very useful informations, thanks.
Thanks for links
thanx
What I do care about is which candidate is most likely to be willing and able to take advantage of the current political moment and move the political center of the country clearly to the ideological left. And given what I care about, I think supporting Edwards is a bit of a no-brainer.
sdsdsdsd
hi all
It's silly to think that you need to invent something brand new to start a business. it's not the case at all and never has been. Seems like a "Duh" to me.
thanks
Very nice site and comments..
thanks
thanks.
What I do care about is which candidate is most likely to be willing and able to take advantage of the current political moment and move the political center of the country clearly to the ideological left. And given what I care about, I think supporting Edwards is a bit of a no-brainer.
thanks.good article.nice site.