
Ask HN: How does one prevent their start-up from being knocked-off? - abl
Although this question has been on my mind for quite some time, the situation with twitvid.io 
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=638526 prompted me to post it on HN.<p>I am posting this as a separate item because I didn't want to take attention away from the twitvid discussions, and I feel this particular topic deserves its own thread.<p>I know the obvious, generalized answers: patents, copyrights, trademarks, creating a strong brand, creating a following, blog, PR, SEO, making the product complicated, trade secrets, etc..<p>What I'd like to discuss instead, are unique ideas for barriers to entry. Also, real-life case scenarios and stories from YC founders and HN users, who have successfully spun-out their start-ups with competition high on their tails, about what they've done to leverage and to keep their first-mover advantage.
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pj
Run faster. Work harder. Don't be lazy. Constant improvement.

Remember, you aren't _building a startup_ , you are building a company. If
you're only building a startup, then just write a few lines of code and push
it out.

What do you really want? Do you always want to be a startup? Or do you want to
be a business? Businesses aren't startups. Businesses are built to last
decades. Are you looking for a quick exit?

Is that what you are really asking? How do you prevent another startup from
exiting in your place?

Why are you even thinking about another startup? Envy? Greed? Do you want more
users? Is it a competition?

What do you really want? It is impossible to prevent your startup from being
knocked off. No number of patents or trademarks or copyrights are going to
prevent someone from knocking off your startup.

Do you think Nike asks, "How do we prevent adidas from making tennis shoes?"

You should be asking, "How does one make a successful company? How does one
last through the startup phase?" Neither of those questions have anything to
do with competition.

~~~
abl
I agree, competition is somewhat of an after-thought when building a
successful company. However I consider the comments "work hard, run faster" to
be general knowledge, something that every blogger will tell you, what you'll
hear at a start-up seminar. What I am interested in, and the reason d'etre of
my post, is to hopefully read actual, real-life stories from the users of HN.
I am sure there has to be at least a few interesting stories based on personal
experience, considering most people here are hard-working indivuduals, driven
to see their business succeed, not just write a few lines of code.

What I mean by start-up, is its literal definition - a business starting out,
with very limited resources, small market share, no brand recognition. Nike
and Adidas are already established brands / companies. I am assuming though,
that they had similar woes when they first started out - its natural to have
competition and to differentiate yourself and your brand from it.

What I would like to see, is a discussion along the lines of "Nike used
special stitching in their shoes, and Adidas didn't, because they didn't feel
it was important. The stitching caused the shoes to gain popularity."
Preferrably for internet-related start-ups, not shoes. :)

------
jmonegro
You can't. You just have to make sure you're the _best_. Nothing has stopped
people from trying to knock off Google, but because they're the best, they
thrive. Same with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and all the other pop startups.

~~~
abl
Of course there is no single magic pill, but I'll try anyway. :)

Google - PageRank. Google was not the first with the product anyway, there
were many other search engines in play already at the time - AltaVista,
Excite, AskJeeves... Google's infrastructure is not easy to replicate, by the
time others caught on to PageRank, Google was already growing exponentially,
past the "start-up" phase. By the time others replicated the functionality,
Google was a house-hold name.

Twitter - SMS, simple interface, API, brand. Would you rather tweet, or send
jaiku's?

YouTube - progressive Flash download, reply features, similar videos actually
worked compared to other sites.

Facebook - clean, organized interface, college accounts validation.

One point to mention though, none of these sites had direct knock-offs, icon
for icon, like the twitvids. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.. had all grown in
popularity before they were knocked off. Or at least that seems to be the
case, unless there were knock-offs that simply were not nearly the same
caliber and just never made it past grandpa's blog as far as spreading use.
What I am talking about are early-early stages of a start-up, like the
twitvids. And looks like they have similar caliber potential judging by their
features currently offered.

P.S. If you want to see a nice Facebook knock-off, take a look at
vkontakte.ru. THE most popular site among the Russian internet users. Probably
the only thing it's missing is the API, and the fact that it found it's niche
with the Russian language.

There is something to be said about knock-offs, and that is why there is
reason to be concerned about it. When listening to presentations of
enterpreneurs from successful start-ups like Facebook and LinkedIn, they will
often talk about "what keeps them up at night."

~~~
pj
abl, you are missing the point.

None of the features of the services you mention are "difficult" to do.
PageRank is very easy. The scale is difficult, but lots of companies can scale
too. How many YouTubes are there? How many social networks are there?

The issue here is that YouTube _continues_ to improve. They never stop. They
just recently "knocked off" the "turn down the lights" feature at Hulu. They
could have said, "aw forget it, no one likes _turn down the lights_ " and
refused to implement it.

YouTube continues to run hard and fast. That's why they _continue_ to be the
winner. If they stop and they don't give their users a constantly improving
product that matches the rest and betters the rest, then youtube will cease to
be the leader.

------
barry-cotter
<flip>Iterating and improving really, really fast.</flip>

I have nothing remotely resembling any real insight into this, but for
something like a pure play internet startup where the barriers to entry are
pretty small, it seems like app quality, luck and bloody-minded perseverance
are probably the most important factors and you only have any real control
over two of those.

Web focused analysis follows

Patents - This is obviously great if you can get it, but I'd say the space of
possible startup ideas that are coverable by patents that enable you to
exploit monopoly power is a lot smaller than the ones that don't.

Copyrights - Well that'll stop someone stealing your _name_ , but what else
have you got? Maybe "look and feel" but even that pushes it. It also requires
lawyers, which are well, expensive.

Creating a Strong Brand - Requires you to have enough users who like you to
use your product and get some buzz. Reduces to building a good product.

Creating a Following _^_

Blog - That'll really help with your page rank in the beginning if you update
regularly and is a way to build community but it doesn't really have anything
to do with preventing knockoffs. If your stuff is good you'll get to the stage
where the vast majority of your users aren't even aware you have a blog.

PR & SEO - Worth doing only if you have something people will stick around for
after they get to your site. You must have something there first.

Making the Product Complicated - You mean having solutions to non trivial
problems baked into your product? Now _that_ raises the barriers to cloning
substantially. And unless you're solving a Hard Problem that has no value
proposition (which would be a kick in the teeth if you discovered that was
what you'd done afterwards) you've made your product better. As has been
mentioned by pg, if you're considering two ways of doing something, one of
which is harder, the harder one is almost certainly teh one to go for, because
you're only considering it because you know it's _better_.

Trade Secrets - I was going to diss this one but it's actually among the best
on the list, and is I think more or less the same as above.

------
justin_vanw
Make something non-trivial.

------
trapper
Make a product no one wants

