

Are you chasing a fad or a market? - slouch
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/04/are-you-chasing-a-fad-or-a-market.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+yegg+%28Gabriel+Weinberg%27s+Blog%29

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Lost_BiomedE
This also has the flavor of Warren Buffet's investing in 'boring businesses'.
I think it is better to make something low-profile with higher likelihood of
success. Bingo card creator is a good example. It takes out a lot of variables
such as luck, connections, and timing.

There are plenty of places that you can choose your competition wisely. I
would rather compete against a ma-and-pa than a fleet of the brightest
engineers battling for space in the new fad market.

I guess it depends somewhat on if you are looking for f-you type money or
something else. If I were to compete in a hard market, I would definitely go
with the let the market move to me approach.

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antrod
One other thing to consider about the big market hypothesis is: how accessible
is it to a capital efficient startup. To take an extreme, the power generation
market in the US is second only to health care, but it is quite unlikely that
you can crack that as an entrepreneur. Similarly, even if you can get into a
big market, the amount of margins available to subscale players is often a
deterrent in and of itself (you can't for instance become a subscale ISP these
days even though Internet access is a huge market as well). Outside of chasing
a fad, going after inaccessible markets is the second biggest mistake I see.

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mark_l_watson
DuckDuckGo is indeed useful. I just spent a while looking around the site and
the only obvious monetization was selling logo clothing and a water bottle.
Just curious: what is their plan for making money?

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nethsix
This is an interesting comment because it may determine if DuckDuckGo (DDG)
can remain true to its privacy goals given that the privacy feature was not
part of its goal initially compared to say 'offering structured content'.
E.g., if privacy-conscious users started using DDG thus enabling DDG to reach
critical mass attracting buyouts, huge advertising dollars for it's structured
content, will DDG cave-in and ditch privacy?

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boyter
Why couldnt you have highly targeted based advertising against the search
terms and not the user?

I can see why it wouldn't be as attractive as knowing everything about the
user and marketing towards them but I don't see why it couldn't work, and it
isn't betraying the users trust so long as the data isn't matched to any IP or
pattern.

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nethsix
You could! It could help DDG make lots of money.

However, my thought was if that (privacy) was not the main goal and something
comes along, e.g., $$$$/partners, that could catapult you to become a market
leader/giant in your core goal area then given the principle of most startups
to focus on a core competency and to do it really well, the secondary goal
(privacy) could be compromised.

EDIT: I don't have a list but I'm sure there have been cases where companies
tweak their policies once they gain traction.

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erik_p
If you're chasing a fad, you're already too late.

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aridiculous
I love the point he made about search engine results not making too much
inherent sense. It took a little bit of work, but I really tried to imagine
what I'd like from a search engine, and it wasn't a list of textual links.

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TillE
Absolutely. If I'm searching for journal articles, I'd love to be able to
explore a network of citations. I want something to capture that experience of
going to a library shelf organized by subject and browsing what's nearby. But
it needs to scale to all works ever published.

