
No-one understood our idea, but now it's worth over $1bn - tablet
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50138290
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throwGuardian
How are such meteoric valuations for companies with relatively smaller moats
(Airtable, slack, etc.) justified?

Why can't Microsoft/Apple/Google throw $20M/annum in OpEx, clone these
products and flood the sales channels these upstarts are going for?

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milesvp
There’s sort of a lifecycle for applications. Early on your userbase needs one
set of features/UI and later, as your userbase matures and gains experience
both with your product and the applications space, feature needs and UI
requirements change. This leaves room ‘at the bottom’ for a company to come
in, offer a small set of features and take some marketshare of maybe the less
sophisticated users.

What stops an entrenched player from simply copying these impinging apps is a
couple if things. First it’s really hard to make a product for multiple market
segments. You either have to make big UI compromises, or have some way to
modify the UI as users gain sophistication. The programmer solution, looking
at open source software, seems to always be to add yet another
config/preference option. This sort of works, but now you also need to
advertise and educate around this option. Second, and probably more important
for comapanies though, is that they are almost universally incapable of
supporting products that are intended to canabalize their own products. This
is particularly problematic when the second product is meant to take low
margin customers. Most businesses would prefer to spend the effort on
attracting and converting high margin customers, while shedding low margin
customers. It’s the classic business school story of how to undermine the
steel industry: focus on rebar first. since no mill wants to make such a low
value item, they will literally subcontract work to you, allowing you to gain
traction in the industry, and then you can slowly improve your offerings.

