David and Google
June 27th, 2007
It’s sometimes easy to kill a new idea just because you think the big guys will be able to do it faster and better. Surprisingly, this is not often the case. Some people (and I am quickly becoming one of those believers) think that large business don’t have the same vision that small startups have. Yes they can probably design and code very quickly but the main idea comes from a small group and that group might not be able to decide which features to implement and I bet they can’t have a clear vision. This can easily be proven: if you give 5 people an idea to work on, you’ll have 5 different businesses and I bet you that all of them will be very different from each other. You will get different business/income models and definitively different looks and features.
With that in mind, what should you do with your idea? I think you should keep working on it..! Even if there are some competitors out there. Did the Google guys quit just because Yahoo! was already out there? No. Would you fight them now? Perhaps no, but they did and it paid very well. They believed in their vision and they succeeded. So most of the times, it’s faster and easier for a large company to buy a smaller startup, especially in a hot market. We’ve seen it in the past, and I’m sure we’ll see it in the future.
So just to cheer you up, here are some examples where “David” was bought by “Goliath”.
eBay bought Paypal for $1.5 billion and killed Billpay.
Google bought Youtube for $1.65 billion and sort of killed Google video.
Yahoo! is trying (over and over - it seems) to buy Facebook as its offering (Yahoo! 360) doesn’t seem to be doing very well.
So as you can see, the lack of a perfect vision can be very costly and the advantage belongs to you. You can come up with a better way. But I’m sure you’re thinking that everything is perfect the way it is and that nothing else can be improved? Wrong. If you need some motivation, please read the Plenty of fish story. In his blog, Markus, the CEO of Plenty of fish mentions some ideas which are still not found on the Internet.
Finally, I should mention that I’m quite surprised by the “death†of Mighty Bids, a Montreal based auction site. I always thought there would be a spot for a totally free auction site but after analyzing them, they looked very similar to Yahoo auctions, which also failed miserably. Perhaps a truly free business model would’ve attracted more users in the mid term..? As a bonus, I leave you with a neat idea. I think that adding videos in an auction site would be a neat idea and would improve the customer’s experience.
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