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Play by Your Own Rules

medium.com

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Re: Play by Your Own Rules

#2

Post by jonathanjaeger »

Love the honesty. Not always great to chase competitors in a market that isn't even clearly a winner. Foursquare won the check-in race but now after all that time they're trying to rebrand away from the check-in, since the check-in business is still kind of niche. But hopefully the data turns into something meaningful.

Re: Play by Your Own Rules

#5

Post by girvo »

Brilliant article. Something to keep in mind. I shuttered a start-up I was working on (VenueMenu) after participating in an accelerator here in Brisbane, Australia (called ilab, I highly recommend it!) for this one simple reason:

We were going into a market that was already defined, with a difference. This difference wasn't enough, and we were always going to be playing the rules of the 800lb gorillas already in place. It was a niche market, that was already over-served.

The nail in the coffin was that here in Australia, the competitors had seen exists at less that AUD$10m. Because of that, no VC's would touch us, so we couldn't get the runway we needed to launch and try to bust the market wide open.

I'm glad we decided to sink the ship before we left the port. I learnt a lot, and saved a lot of time and money.

Re: Play by Your Own Rules

#7

Post by kurtvarner »

You can't really blame them for taking the path they chose. Check-ins were what the market wanted at that time. Gowalla was guaranteed to be building for a market that existed. Yes, they could have said, "Screw check-ins, let's focus on photos", but that would have been a much bigger risk than going to war with an equally early staged startup.

Imagine if they would have drastically pivoted away from check-ins and failed. I'm sure Gowalla would be contemplating what could have been if they stayed true to check-ins and went to war with Foursquare.

I think it's too easy to say in retrospect that they should have "played by their own rules." Even though they were playing by the check-in rules, at least they were playing in a real game.

Re: Play by Your Own Rules

#8

Post by espadagroup »

kurtvarner wrote: post #7

You can't really blame them for taking the path they chose. Check-ins were what the market wanted at that time. Gowalla was guaranteed to be building for a market that existed. Yes, they could have said, "Screw check-ins, let's focus on photos", but that would have been a much bigger risk than going to war with an equally early staged startup. Imagine if they would have drastically pivoted away from check-ins and fai…

Agreed, it's much more easy for Burbn, in 4th, 5th, 6th? place to say, hey let's try and pivot a bit rather than fight for first in this arena.

Re: Play by Your Own Rules

#9

Post by iamwil »

kurtvarner wrote: post #7

You can't really blame them for taking the path they chose. Check-ins were what the market wanted at that time. Gowalla was guaranteed to be building for a market that existed. Yes, they could have said, "Screw check-ins, let's focus on photos", but that would have been a much bigger risk than going to war with an equally early staged startup. Imagine if they would have drastically pivoted away from check-ins and fai…

Actually, you can, which was the point of his essay: focus on validating your vision, rather than being reactive to someone else's actions.

They were too focused on being reactive to a competitor, rather than really understanding their users. Because if you just copy whatever your competitor is doing, you're getting the understanding of your users second-hand, and you might end up copying things that aren't important--you might end up cargo culting.

He's not saying, "Oh, if we had only just done photo sharing, we would have knocked it out of the park!" He's saying that while checkins was a way to validate that users want to play a game that lets them see the world through their friends' eyes, they should have been open to other solutions to validate against that original thesis (like photo sharing), instead of being caught up in being competitive overriding the validation and learning about their users.

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