Elliot Swan

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Don’t Do It (Even If You’re Better) 3:30 pm

There’s another problem with valuing ideas so much–they’re easy to steal. Er, excuse me, “borrow.”

Evolution

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. Just as the execution of an idea can help it move forward, so can several attempts of execution help the idea move forward even more so. In a free market, competition drives the market forward and generally helps out everybody–but only if it’s a success.

The Problem With Adaption In a Web 2.0 World

There’s a lot more to it than getting an idea and executing it well. It also has to be useful to somebody, and you need to convince enough of these somebodies to switch over and adapt to your version.

With the introduction of any new, competing product, there’s going to be mountains to climb. You’ll have to overcome biases, existing company loyalties, and who knows what else–but this gets even trickier when your product is dealing with the social web.

Products that deal with the social web exist because they allow people to connect; and companies like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter all have found ways to do this.

People see this success and come up with an idea that would greatly improve one of these ideas. So what do they do? They start their own, “better” version. Surely everybody will love this new improvement and switch over.

Not so. It doesn’t matter if you have a better design, more features, more venture capital, or a cooler domain name. The product isn’t the service itself, the product is the people the service is connecting.

Now, not only do you have to prove to somebody that your product is better than the existing competition, but now you also have to find a way to convince that somebody and all of his or her friends to move over at the exact same time.

Is Virb better than MySpace? Well, it’s definitely nicer to use and has a much better execution. But how many people do I know who actually use it? Not many.

There’s a reason nobody talks about Pownce anymore. And there’s a reason Prologue probably won’t go anywhere (other than the fact that I still don’t really *get* it). I’m sure you can figure out the reason by now.

But What About My Great Idea?

Unless you already have a huge audience with a lot of customer loyalty, find a better way to execute. Find a way to provide your improvements to the existing customer base for your would-be competition. In other words, “join ‘em.” Why would you want to compete with Twitter’s success when you can simply build off it?