

Ask HN: A web site that is vulnerable to a good competitor? - andrewtbham

I have been thinking about how lots of successful web sites were late to the market, but were cheaper, or better designed.  (stack overflow, plenty of fish, all the 37 signals products, etc.)  Can you think of a site where a lean competitor could steal market share?<p>I have been thinking about survey monkey.
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klapinat0r
TVRage.com, or even TV.com, are both sites which are very good at certain
points. TVRage mainly: having up-to-date episode listings. TV.com mainly:
relevant news to the navigated page, extensive bio/episode description
archive, respectively.

Both sites have forums. Neither of which are particular active. TV.com's forum
takes the lead in that area, however it seems the audience for tv-serie forums
are located on fan-site forums instead.

Both sites use userbased contributions (to some extend). TV.com seems more
professionally handled (also endorsed, so obviously has an advantage), whereas
TVRage summaries, bios etc., seem more random and not necessarily added to
complete a show's info.

Perhabs a better ranking/modding scheme could make for a TV.com/TVRage
competitor? I haven't given it much thought, but taking something simple and
easy to use like, say, up/down voting (which web users of today are familiar
with) as an aid to moderate the info on the site could be an idea.

An advantage of TVRage is it's open-ness and (willingness to have an) API.
I've used this many times, and in a web-age where people want to present stuff
at their own website how they want (kind of like a new-age "embedded link" or
"widget"), APIs are a great way to show that your core speciality is
information, and the accuracy of this, and if someone wants to present it in a
blue/yellow website so be it, as long as people know where to go to get to the
source: you.

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keiferski
Wufoo (YC 06) is essentially a better designed Survey Monkey.
<http://www.wufoo.com>

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andrewtbham
That site does have great design... it's a little cartoonish, but well done.
There are a lot of competitors in the space.

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ig1
Well Plenty of Fish seems like a good target, bad design/UX makes it
vulnerable

Vault and eBay are another two examples.

What these all have in common is requiring a critical mass of users to work,
which gives them a barrier to entry that allows them to become complacent.

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dawson
Microsoft HealthVault

