Tag: chicken and egg
Vimeo vs. MegaUpload vs. YouTube: Contrasting Strategies Of Competing Platforms
Startups often believe that technical aspects of the product provide competitive advantages and that two products with similar technical aspects have little scope for differentiation. Hence, it is believed that a late mover with similar technology cannot get traction and that the early mover has a significant advantage. However, as we shall demonstrate with the [...]
Putting The Market Before The Product
A platform usually needs a burst of activity to gain traction, leading to enough interactions among the users. Such bursts of activity require a large group of users to simultaneously arrive. As a result, building a potential market beforehand is critical in case of platforms. This post discusses platforms that executed this successfully.
Exclusivity: The Antisocial Way To Seed A Social Product
Gmail’s exclusivity was a masterstroke from Google that enabled it to enter and dominate a product space as commodifed as email. But Google Wave was a dud. What does it take for exclusivity to work?
Conquer Your Micro-Universe: Choosing Your Harvard
Mark Zuckerberg started with Harvard and went on to conquer the globe. Choosing the right micro-universe can set you on the path to success just as choosing the wrong one can yield little more than a brief spill in the vanity metrics pool.
Conquer Your Micro-Universe – Part 1
Platforms that get big always start by deliberately staying small till they spark transactions. Getting critical mass in a smaller set (a micro-universe) is considerably easier than in a larger set.
How Groupon Solved The Critical Mass Problem And Got A Thousand Clones
Groupon solved the critical mass problem by lowering critical mass in a model which was very easy to seed but very difficult to scale. As a result, Groupon clones startup and die early deaths around us every day.
Viral Growth: How Paypal, Youtube And StumbleUpon Gained Rapid Traction Through Piggybacking
A great way to seed a network is to leverage another. Piggyback on a thriving network as long as your platform is contextual and complementary to that network.
Platform Seeding Strategies
Seeding a platform business poses several unique challenges as producers won’t participate without consumers and vice versa. We explore the strategies for overcoming this problem.
Platform junkie, Singapore-based Early stage internet guy, Currently advisor to multiple platform startups.
This blog is about taking ventures from an idea to a business... and mitigating execution risk.
