

In greenfield markets, your competitors are your friends - dreeves
http://blog.beeminder.com/competitors

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dreeves
Relevant excerpt:

It's funny how we once thought of it as worrisome to see other startups
pursuing our idea. It's so clearly the opposite of worrisome! The more the
merrier! All these startups are helping each other get the public exposed to
commitment devices.

It's like my brother who has a sushi restaurant in Peoria, IL with one primary
competitor in town. Since most people in town haven't even tried sushi, most
of the marketing that my brother's competitor does is just creating new sushi
eaters, some of whom will then presumably eat at my brother's restaurant.
Anecdotally, that effect dwarfs any actual customer stealing that the
competitor may do.

With Beeminder and StickK and now Aherk and others, it's like that but even
more so: 99% of the population hasn't heard of a single one of us!

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justindocanto
Sounded interesting. Opened link. Saw this & Closed.

From the website: "UPDATE: I originally referred to it as a “gay photo” which
I thought was kosher since I clarified that I was not using “gay” pejoratively
nor do I equate “gay” with “compromising”. Sense was quickly knocked into me
(thanks everyone!): steer a wide berth around the kinds of things bigots say
and don’t rely on wordy explanations to counter a first impression!"

Seriously?

~~~
dreeves
Eep, sorry, I don't want that to distract from the real point of the post! I
think it will make sense if you check out the idea behind behind Aherk.

~~~
justindocanto
I'm just not interested in listening to somebody that talks like that, whether
corrected or not. You might have great ideas or a post or whatever the link
was, but it's an immediate turn off for me. Sorry. =)

~~~
dreeves
Oy, really sorry about that. I guess we should take further discussion offline
but I'm eager to understand what "like that" means. The word "gay" itself
isn't offensive, I assume. I can't help but feel you must've taken it the
wrong way. But even if so it was dumb of me to say something so easily
misinterpretable.

Btw, the original version of the paragraph in question is included at the very
end.

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bsoule
This is similar to how stores of the same type cluster together. But the sushi
analogy may not map to web services, because with sushi you might explicitly
seek variety. With a web service of this sort, you get drawn in. They have
your contract, your data, etc, and there's a cost to switching.

------
dreeves
I'm curious, have others written posts like this on their company blog,
extolling the virtues of (and linking to) your competitors?

