Today I just sent this email to a buddy of mine working on a startup:
If [competitor.com] was a physical store on a street and you wanted to build a store right next to them, what would you build? Would you build exactly the same store or would you do something different?
I always talk about so many me-too products and startups out there today, and the ease of building competitors to just about anything. But entrepreneurs don’t seem to want to stop thinking they can exist and thrive with essentially a clone of something else out there.
My statement/question above is a problem about the internet. In the real world, if you were to build a store on a busy street, would you build exactly the same store? Probably not. You would see that if you wanted all those pedestrians to walk into your store, you’d want to build something with some kind of uniqueness to attract them, and rarely would you want to build the same business that already existed on the street. But on the internet, you can’t see what’s on your street so easily. The browser detaches ourselves from the brutal reality that your competition can be literally a virtual store or two down from you but yet you can’t perceive it as a problem because it’s virtual and not something physically experienced.
And this problem is exponential on the internet as the virtual street you’re building on is limitless in available storefront. Imagine a street with a limited number of pedestrians but tens, if not hundreds of storefronts are squeezing all onto that street, creating ever smaller slices of storefronts for internet pedestrians to walk by, all screaming at them to come in and buy my stuff please!
So ask yourself again – do you want to be yet another storefront on an infinite street or do you want to build something that is truly unique to attract internet pedestrians away from all the same stuff?