So what is this about? The horror of competing with a bigger company? Google didn't kill your startup, You did. You did that after You got scared and didn't have nothing interesting/unique to compete with them. Stop crying, most people are in debt to the rest of their lives after their companies fail.
How Google killed my startup
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: How Google killed my startup
#22TL;DR playing video games is easier than starting a real company so let's do that instead. His analogy of participating in a "boss fight" is flawed since it sounds more like they just turned off the game system as soon as a hint of the boss monster's first tentacle even appeared on the screen.
I'd say it's more like they turned off the game after the opening cut scene. This doesn't really qualify as a fumblebrag because they didn't actually start.
They assume that funding was in the bag already, that the product would get built on time (or at all) and that even 1 person would sign up. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't.
They were right about one thing though, the timing was fortunate that it was squashed just a little past the idea stage.
Re: How Google killed my startup
#23"Along the way, we learned an enormous amount about building a startup, pitching potential investors, and things such as cap tables, term sheets, Series A rounds, company valuation. It felt like a real-world MBA crash course."
You learned everything about building a startup except building a profitable, sustainable business. Everything else is secondary.
Re: How Google killed my startup
#24GameFAQS.com has been around since the 90s. They housed both user-submitted and commercial guides/tips/cheats/etc, and free . Now, this guy has a great principle on the tech giants being a threat for a competitive, efficient economy, but I'm just not with him on this one. His only marketable niche would be to get the top paid gaming professionals (like the Dota 2 team that won $6million this month), and provide a mar…
I agree. The reason game guides make money at all is because they have shops like Gamestop pushing those guides with every purchase. Not many a gamer is going to pay even $5 for a video guide they have to watch the entirety of if they just want to know how to do X thing when that's freely available in multiple forms elsewhere. For specific things gamefaqs and achievement guide videos are already a well established free "product".
A business is not just "people want X." It has to at least fit the "ENOUGH people want X and are willing to pay for it or are valuable enough as users in order to be sold to advertisers." The morality of that can be debated to death and isn't very interesting, but the reality of it is something we seem to miss a lot.
Re: How Google killed my startup
#25It wasn't the Google who killed the startup, it was the OP. YouTube is already a threat to gaming video services, even without a specialized offering. Still, Twitch took off.
If YouTube was going to be YouTube of gaming, then OP could have been Vimeo of gaming. I mean seriously, if Vimeo could be a profitable enterprise with a free, good enough YouTube, then so could them.
I'm not sure about other people, but events like these are usually more telling of myself than the deterrent. Almost every idea would have extreme challenges on the way. If I was the OP I would conclude that Google brought out my own insecurity about the product to surface. Nobody gives up on the castle they want to live in.
EDIT: The irony here is that he seems to have forgotten how YouTube was successful despite Google Video.
Re: How Google killed my startup
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
> very niche. Yes, but I don't think that means it's doomed. Every site doesn't have to be youtube or twitch. > very unattractive. Your complaint is extremely subjective and evidently false for tons of people considering the brisk business game guide companies have done for decades and that streamers do on twitch and youtube today. > very monetizeable. Yes.
> Your complaint is extremely subjective and evidently false for tons of people Possibly, but please consider this: Game guides and gamefaqs.com contain reference works wherein one can go and look up details when one is stuck. One doesn't usually read the whole thing to learn how to play the game in the most efficient way (unless it's competitive or has complexity on the level of a programming language, like Minecraf…
> One doesn't usually read the whole thing to learn how to play the game in the most efficient way (unless it's competitive or has complexity on the level of a programming language, like Minecraft).
I'm not sure about game guides, but:
1) Walkthroughs are absolutely not the only type of guide that GameFAQs houses. It has never been only walkthroughs, even from its very early beginnings. The easiest example of this is Fighting games, which will have in-depth strategy and gameplay guides made specifically for each player.
2) GameFAQs has had a forum for ages, which also has this as the primary topic of discussion. It was in fact the first forum that I ever participated in as a young child, along with some #IRC channels.
> I'm unaware of twitch streamers or youtubers who primarily teach how to play a game. Can you point out examples of those? I'm really curious.
You're being facetious. Do you not know how to Google as well? I'm really serious. :edit:In the offchance you aren't feigning ignorance[0]
Re: How Google killed my startup
#27This reminds me of the story of Blizzard seeing Dominion Storm at E3 in 1996. After seeing the demo, they felt like they should kill Starcraft because of how much "better" Ion Storm's demo was than their own.
Turns out is was mostly smoke and mirrors, and Blizzard made an exceptional game because of it.
http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-go-d...
Re: How Google killed my startup
#28Seems as though the author got scared and gave up.
And rightly so.
No. It may have been smart to let this idea go, but "Google entered the space" is not generally a good reason to give up.
For niche products, small companies are often in a surprisingly good position to compete with Google (or pretty much any giant company).
Advantages small companies have:
* Much easier to change feature/function/benefit and packaging to adapt to the market
* Not competing with revenue from 1000 other internal projects for staffing
* Similarly: can sustain a business with tiny beachhead markets that Google can't waste time capturing
It seems like people immediately realize that Google can own tiny markets (obviously, if you can own the whole market, you should be able to capture any subset of it), but don't realize that in practice Google won't capture small niches, because it's irrational for them to deploy engineers to earn $10 when those same engineers can be deployed to earn $100 somewhere else.
Also: just because you have all the resources of Google doesn't mean you're going to stick the landing on every project you start. On niche products, it's not only possible but actually kind of likely that you can out-execute Google.
That doesn't make live gaming videos a great new startup idea. Just be careful of the logic that says "Google entered a space and so now it's dead".
Re: How Google killed my startup
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly what I thought. Except they mentioned they did make over $1 million.
Not quite: "Our forecasts had us profitable as of summer, 2016, and closing our second year with nearly $1.2-million in revenue." Those were forecasts, not actual revenue.
You're right, it does sound like they mean it's a forecast. But predicting that kind of revenue (and so specific) when you don't have any revenue at all sounds a bit odd. What's it based on, if not an actual curve of growing revenue?
Re: How Google killed my startup
#30[deleted]