Hundreds of Start-Ups Hope to Be a Copycat Start-Up • Hacker News Board

Re: Hundreds of Start-Ups Hope to Be a Copycat Start-Up

#31

Post by 001sky » Sat, Dec 07, 2013, 7:15 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

The author confuses the language of ' for ' with a copy of. If you are the 'Uber of Dog Walking' you are not a copy of Uber. Instead you have taken one part of the Uber puzzle, "on demand access using a smart phone" and applied it to the problem of finding a dog walker [1]. The sort of language arises because these techniques and technologies are created without names. In the physical world, you might have something…

I agree with the general thrust of this. In the specific context of startups, its also not so much mimicry as it is appropriation of the brand identity of (X,Y). Its basically leveraging others expenditures as a form of budget "hack", because its both quicker and less resource intensive. As a result, as a guerilla (marketing) tactic its effective. It also PR/link bait for lazy journalists. Their audiences are usually already conditioned on the uber awesomeness of X and/or Y. Last but not least, is a sort of pavlovian effect on investors's greed instinct.

edits: brevity

Re: Hundreds of Start-Ups Hope to Be a Copycat Start-Up

#32

Post by lazyjones » Sat, Dec 07, 2013, 7:17 PM UTC

In other - apparently less exciting - news, some apparently foolish people even found new car makers, newspapers, furniture stores despite the obvious lack of originality and crowded markets. What are they thinking!?

Re: Hundreds of Start-Ups Hope to Be a Copycat Start-Up

#33

Post by spacecowboy » Sat, Dec 07, 2013, 7:19 PM UTC

kops wrote: post #17

Isn't it weird that this author did most of his research on angel.co which itself can be described as match.com for entrepreneurs?

Nice :)

Re: Hundreds of Start-Ups Hope to Be a Copycat Start-Up

#34

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 07, 2013, 7:31 PM UTC

bmelton wrote: post #24

tomasien wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you use Facebook, but on Facebook there is a constant wave of quotes mis-attributed to Einstein and Thomas Jefferson. It's really interesting, they all get 10000's of shares. Somebody somewhere (or just the crowd accidentally) A/B tested a ton of different historical figures and came out with Einstein and TJ.

The patois of misattribution is, often times, a rather fun deception -- to see who will share the meme. Things like "The internet is full of trolls" are captioned to a photo of Abraham Lincoln, for example. Or, more recently, the phenomenon of attributing moving quotations to Taylor Swift, or Barack Obama, where the actual source was Adolph Hitler. In short, you're not wrong that these things occur, but in some cases…

[deleted]

Re: Hundreds of Start-Ups Hope to Be a Copycat Start-Up

#35

Post by seivan » Sat, Dec 07, 2013, 7:36 PM UTC

crassus wrote: post #28

tomasien wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

W/R/T who reads it, one of my best friends LOVES Valleywag and I ask him about it all the time. He thinks SV is just up its own ass (maybe), especially as it relates to social issues (yes) and that makes it like hate porn for him. I suppose that makes an ounce of sense, but the criticism of the businesses and innovation themselves feel out of place in that environment. The other side is just haters, there's been a re…

With respect to the social issues - on GitHub, nobody knows you're not a white straight male, but it turns out that open source is mostly written by white straight males anyway. Most of the criticism from the east coast seems to be that Silicon Valley doesn't care enough about correcting this outcome, and I'd say they are right - most engineers care more about how code works than who wrote it, and that's very much an…

I don't use certain OSS libs because of the people writing/maintaing it. I'd rather spent some nights and weekends writing my own. Of course this is if it's feasible.

Sometimes I got no choice.

Re: Hundreds of Start-Ups Hope to Be a Copycat Start-Up

#36

Post by soneca » Sat, Dec 07, 2013, 7:38 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #2

It's a common misconception that a startup describing itself as x of/for y is a sign of lack of originality. A lot of original ideas-- perhaps most good original ideas-- are initially conceived of as x of/for y. Plus it is a good tactic, which we actively encourage, for startups to describe themselves in those terms initially. It may not describe a startup perfectly, but it's the the most information you can convey i…

But I must say that I got a little bit disappointed when I found out that the first brazilian company to get in YC was a "Yelp for Brazil". No misconception here, as this is not an analogy, but a description that is a copy focused at another country.

Re: Hundreds of Start-Ups Hope to Be a Copycat Start-Up

#37

Post by rmason » Sat, Dec 07, 2013, 7:45 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #2

It's a common misconception that a startup describing itself as x of/for y is a sign of lack of originality. A lot of original ideas-- perhaps most good original ideas-- are initially conceived of as x of/for y. Plus it is a good tactic, which we actively encourage, for startups to describe themselves in those terms initially. It may not describe a startup perfectly, but it's the the most information you can convey i…

The entire premise of the article is incorrect. What these startups are doing is copying the business model.

Copying the startup would be similar to what the Samwer brothers are doing in Europe where they clone a startup down to the individual pixel.

I don't think there's a thing wrong with appropriating the business model of say an Uber and applying it to an entirely different business. Its done successfully all the time.

Re: Hundreds of Start-Ups Hope to Be a Copycat Start-Up

#38

Post by colmvp » Sat, Dec 07, 2013, 7:45 PM UTC

soneca wrote: post #36

pg wrote: post #2

It's a common misconception that a startup describing itself as x of/for y is a sign of lack of originality. A lot of original ideas-- perhaps most good original ideas-- are initially conceived of as x of/for y. Plus it is a good tactic, which we actively encourage, for startups to describe themselves in those terms initially. It may not describe a startup perfectly, but it's the the most information you can convey i…

But I must say that I got a little bit disappointed when I found out that the first brazilian company to get in YC was a "Yelp for Brazil". No misconception here, as this is not an analogy, but a description that is a copy focused at another country.

Even the visual design was pretty close to Yelp.

Re: Hundreds of Start-Ups Hope to Be a Copycat Start-Up

#39

Post by chetanahuja » Sat, Dec 07, 2013, 7:49 PM UTC

Can't agree with pg's advice about "A for B" construct. Maybe it does help faster communication (if accurate) in certain cases. But it's useless to pretend that a reasonably disinterested observer (i.e., not an investor trying to ride the boom-train to a quick exit without a profitable business) will not immediately mark you down for an unoriginal fast-follower.

Re: Hundreds of Start-Ups Hope to Be a Copycat Start-Up

#40

Post by byoung2 » Sat, Dec 07, 2013, 7:50 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #2

It's a common misconception that a startup describing itself as x of/for y is a sign of lack of originality. A lot of original ideas-- perhaps most good original ideas-- are initially conceived of as x of/for y. Plus it is a good tactic, which we actively encourage, for startups to describe themselves in those terms initially. It may not describe a startup perfectly, but it's the the most information you can convey i…

It's interesting that a similar technique for pitching movies (e.g. Terminator meets Titanic) is strongly discouraged while for startups it is encouraged. I wonder what makes the same approach elicit different reactions across industry lines.