11–20 of 59 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and you could almost say Myspace moved too fast, chased after local maxima (rapid A/B testing) and pursued vanity metrics (registered users). In contrast, Facebook stepped back enough to have a real vision, and carefully chose the right metric (active users). DAU and MAU are industry standards today, but back then it was a bold and careful decision by Facebook.
What's DAU and MAU?
Either they were moving too slow or announced new product too early (killing demand for the model they were actually selling). They went bankrupt before new model came out...
Apparently not entirely true, but that was the takeaway. it got a name: the "Osborne Effect"
There are tons of them. You'll see a lot of responses that claim all of these companies didn't die due to moving slowly, but for other reasons - that will also always be true though, even in cases where a startup moved too slow. For example, Windows Phone was both backwards, and slow to match the iPhone once it became obvious consumers loved touch.
In many consumer spaces, it's: 'winner take most.' If your competition gets to critical adoption first, most of the time you're toast. So even if Gowalla was growing slowly, they were too far behind. If your competitor takes 60% of the market, you've previously been growing fast but are now growing slowly, and you're now down to 14% of the market - the outcome is most likely that your future growth will be extremely difficult, and eventually you'll burn vast resources just trying to acquire each point of market share thereafter. Microsoft and Google have both delivered rare, extremely expensive examples of this behavior over a long-term basis (in search for Microsoft and social for Google), funded by their prior dominant products.
https://twitter.com/mikeyavo/status/223263315038711808
Side note - That was also the first time I understood the risk of putting content into a closed eco system that's using non open standards for data.
According to Joel Spolsky, Ingres lost to Oracle due to slow growth: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-... Discussion on a previous thread also suggests that Fogbugz suffered the same fate due to growing slower than Atlassian: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920668
I last used FogBugz in 2008 and it's still my favorite bug tracker. I have used JIRA extensively and while you can configure it and add addons/plugins to it to make it do your bidding, it's just not a nice off-the-shelf solution without configuration (stuff that I usually don't have the access to do, and that I get tired of asking for).
Funny how this stuff works. I wonder how Fogbugz is doing today. I do understand they must have done well with the Trello stuff.
I am aware of multiple companies that died because they were forced to "grow too fast", rather than growing slow. One was a search engine ahead of google in its category that would have been an ideal google acquisition target (in fact, google is still doing a poor job in their area of search.) Another was a company that invented a key gaming technology, but was ahead of the market by a couple years. In both cases the…
If the growth rate is slower (or faster) than the optimal growth rate then the management has made a mistake (assuming they have any control over this). When you frame it this way what you are asking is have any startups failed for making mistakes which is does not need to be answered. What you are really asking is it possible to workout in real-time (no hindsight) what the optimal growth rate should be for each comp…
According to Joel Spolsky, Ingres lost to Oracle due to slow growth: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-... Discussion on a previous thread also suggests that Fogbugz suffered the same fate due to growing slower than Atlassian: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920668
I am aware of multiple companies that died because they were forced to "grow too fast", rather than growing slow. One was a search engine ahead of google in its category that would have been an ideal google acquisition target (in fact, google is still doing a poor job in their area of search.) Another was a company that invented a key gaming technology, but was ahead of the market by a couple years. In both cases the…
According to Joel Spolsky, Ingres lost to Oracle due to slow growth: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-... Discussion on a previous thread also suggests that Fogbugz suffered the same fate due to growing slower than Atlassian: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920668
On a tangent, it's kinda funny how part of the "geek" community will complain about the big players dominating and ruining competition (Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, even Linux sometimes), but on the other hand anybody who doesn't completely dominate their competition is lambasted for being a failure...
[1] http://www.actian.com/products/operational-databases/ingres/