Your Business Idea Shouldn’t Be Unique
Because the successful ones aren’t
“Amazon is such an amazing idea; with a click of a button, I can purchase so many different items and have them delivered to me in record time. If only I had that idea first.”
You hear this kind of thing all the time, but it’s not a good enough excuse because even Jeff himself didn’t have the idea first.
Before Amazon, there was NetMartket.
Net who?
Google wasn’t the first search engine, not even close. Facebook wasn’t the first social network. Dropbox wasn’t the first cloud storage. Spotify wasn’t the first on-demand music platform. Alibaba wasn’t the first B2B wholesale eCommerce.
Then why are these businesses so incredibly successful?
‘The Unfair Advantage’
The inspiration to write this article came from a book called ‘The Unfair Advantage.’ Particularly chapter 14, where Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba discuss generating an idea for your startup.
Let’s talk about Google and Facebook.
Algorithm
In any given minute, Google handles circa. 3.8 million searches globally. No one can argue against Google’s spectacular success as a search engine.
However, Google wasn’t the first search engine; in fact, it was so difficult to find funding during that time due to the oversaturation of the market. Prior to Google, there was Lycos, Inktomi, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, and more. What made Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s idea so special was their insight and execution.
The algorithm, PageRank, was developed during a college research project whilst Page and Brin were Ph.D. students at Standford University. PageRank went onto become the algorithm behind Google.
The algorithm was far superior compared to the opposition. Other search engines ranked websites based on the relevance of the text they contained compared with what the user was searching. Google assessed websites’ authority and influence based on the number of other authoritative sites associated with them. The underlying assumption was that more authoritative websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.
This meant a search for “Ford” showed up on Ford.com instead of a blogging site that had copied the word “Ford” 50 times at the bottom of the page.
You can gain insight into a particular field through your education, network, or location.
Advertising
Google’s advertising was another reason for its raging success.
Page and Brin hated the idea of banner ads. They believed banner ads were ugly and distracting. Furthermore, banner ads took time to load. Both Page and Brin possessed an obsession with efficiency and agility. In fact, they publicly criticised advertising-funded search engines which you can read more about in their 1998 academic paper.
By the end of 1999, Google had approximately 50 employees and was bleeding cash. Michael Moritz, an investor, stated that the team “really couldn’t figure out the business model” and “there was a period where things were looking pretty bleak.”
This is when Overture, formally known as GoTo.com, comes into the picture.
As Page and Brin were frantically trying to figure out how they were going to advertise, they decided to take a closer look at GoTo.com, another search engine.
Bill Gross founded the company in February 1998, approximately 7 months before Google. Gross had approached the search engine market with a similar mindset to Page and Brin but from a business perspective.
Gross introduced the paid search, where websites could pay for higher placement on the GoTo.com results page for a searched word. This was beneficial for both advertisers and users. Advertisers only paid to reach the eyes of customers who were already searching for their product, and users didn’t see irrelevant advertising. On top of this, Gross created audacious pricing, meaning that an advertiser only paid for the clicks on their ads.
Google was still more dominant as a search engine; however, Overture was the key Page, and Brin needed to make money.
Gross suggested a merger, but Google refused. After Yahoo partnered with Overture, Google decided to build its own system. They basically wanted to create the same thing but better, and they did. They integrated the advertising system with the rest of the search engine function. When Gross was asked if Google stole his idea, he said, “we didn’t patent the idea, so if we don’t patent it, they can copy it.”
So is Google truly a unique idea or a collection of great ideas executed flawlessly?
Execution
Similarly, Facebook was not the first social network, not even close. There were already SixDegrees, MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, Bebo, and many more during that period. Some people account Facebook’s success to the way it was released rather than the idea itself.
Facebook was initially an exclusive service to Harvard students. Following this stage, it was distributed to other universities and eventually the greater public. From face value, this might seem like it bottlenecked the company’s growth, but in reality, this method is the exact reason Facebook didn’t fail like Friendster.
Founded by Jonathan Abrams in 2002, Friendster was a social network prior to Facebook. Unfortunately, it died in 2006 due to its exponential growth.
But how can growth be a bad thing?
Well, growth can be catastrophic if it is at the expense of the customer experience. Friendster did not have the technology and infrastructure to handle the traffic to its servers. This resulted in the users leaving the platform for a better alternative.
As Facebook had hindsight, it was an obvious choice by Zuckerberg to release Facebook in stages. Facebook built the infrastructure gradually at each step of the release. Additionally, new users had the incentive to join at each stage as they potentially had family members or friends using it.
Those of you who have seen the movie ‘The Social Network’ would be familiar with the narrative that Zuckerberg ‘stole’ the idea from the Winklevoss twins. In one of the scenes, Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Zuckerberg, says, “if you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”
Although this is a movie and was created for entertainment purposes, I still believe there is merit behind that quote.
Every day, millions of people worldwide have phenomenal ideas, but the people who actually make it a reality are the ones who execute.
Conclusion
All these businesses learned from the mistakes of the first movers in their respective fields. Being a pioneer in a particular industry can definitely be an advantage. But being oblivious to the disadvantages associated with building an entirely novel idea is dangerous. Moreover, placing too much importance on originality can lead you to never making anything.
“The pioneers take the arrows, the settlers take the land.’”— Amory Lovin.
Your startup idea doesn’t need to be completely novel or ground-breaking. Instead, the goal is to add a twist to an already existing idea to solve a problem. A twist doesn’t mean a gimmick. Instead, it means thinking creatively and producing a product that is undoubtedly better than what already exists.
The best way to be creative is to think interdisciplinarily and merge unconventional fields.
For example, journalism mixed with social networking — what Medium did.
But even more importantly, how you execute that idea will ultimately determine if you succeed or fail. So conduct thorough market research and learn from the mistakes of the opposition.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed my article and are a budding entrepreneur, I sincerely suggest reading ‘The Unfair Advantage’ by Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba.
Author: Burak M. Gunduz
