“Me-too” products are fine

http://businessofsoftware.org/2012/09/me-too-products-are-fine/

by nhebb • 14 years ago

137 34 14 years ago

benologist• 14 years ago

They're not only fine they're normal. Most startups can be defined as "paying us instead of X" and it's even more pronounced with movies, games, music etc. You don't have to be first to win, you don't even necessarily have to be better.

soup10• 14 years ago

I agree with this, 'me-too' products should be everyone's first business. Creating your first product is too damn hard and requires too much risk and dedication to make something where there isn't clear demand and a path to profitability. 'Me-too' products are far safer bets for first-timers. The VC mentality of funding many over ambitious ideas and hoping one or two works out, is helpful if you want to change the world, but completely wrong if you just want financial independence.

noirman• 14 years ago

"Overnight success is an exception, not a rule. For every “Angry Birds” there are thousands of game studios who never made it."

Angry Birds is the maker's 52nd game. Overnight that.

doomlaser• 14 years ago

Angry Birds is a "me too" product in its own right, with its mechanics copied from popular flash games like Crush the Castle. Where it differentiates is its polish and style, as well as widely accessible characters, and a dedication to releasing new content.

It also wasn't an overnight success. It released in December 2009 and dropped off of the top paid app charts in the US without making much of a splash, and only began its meteoric rise months later after an update with more content and a lucrative negotiation for a "Game of the Week" iTunes feature from Apple.

You can view its history here: http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/angry-birds/ranking/history/...

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Angry%20Birds&c...

pilsetnieks• 14 years ago

Overnight success takes years of hard work.

grueful• 14 years ago

Copy the competition, just don't plagiarize the competition.

Competition means there are customers who think X is worth paying money for. Competition means there are customers who already think X is the solution to their problem.

But design your own solution. Do your own research. Figure out how the competition is letting down specific segments of the market, why people are still arguing about which solution is the best X for Y. Figure out how your target customers are different, then build something that does a better job of satisfying their needs.

alexchamberlain• 14 years ago

This is a great read and makes some good points. I think it's probably more likely you can boot strap a me too product, because you have less explanation to do. People already know they need your product.

npguy• 14 years ago

The challenge is this: are you solving a difficult problem? If the answer is no, you might not be able to sustain the energy levels in the medium to long run.

louischatriot• 14 years ago

Completely agree with this. Even going further than a better copy and plagiarizing (read "Rocket Internet") is not something I find that shameful, if you are able to launch a proven idea in new markets.

I wouldn't work for Rocket but I sure think their are very good at what they do, and useful too if they're able to bring startups like Stripe to us.

ChrisNorstrom• 14 years ago

Me-too products are a great start for aspiring entrepreneurs. I'd like to apologize to all of Hacker News for being such an asshole in my previous post [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4338182]. There's nothing wrong with building ANOTHER Mobile ad platform, social media analytics, team based project manager, reward program site, online store builder, or subscription service is perfectly fine. Money is money, business is business. Building anything is a thousand times better than building nothing.

naitbit• 14 years ago

What about me-too comments? Are they also thousand times better than writing nothing? Is it different because of scale?

IMO biggest value of Me-too products are in their (even slight) differences from existing ones. For entrepreneur they obviously give him experience and may bring him money but from consumer point of view gains are smaller. Me-too products increase competition(making monopoly or stagnation less likely and bringing prices down), but straight up clones have same (relatively small) cost as me-too comments: decreasing signal to noise ratio.

Evbn3• 14 years ago

Clones at the same or higher price increase noise.... unless they have better marketing to reach a wider customer range than the original; that adds value.

gavanwoolery• 14 years ago

Yeah, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a "me-too" product...

...However, you really should try to minimize your me-tooism. By all means, copy a basic product idea, but also try to innovate (even if just a little bit). On the other hand, do not try and innovate too much - if your project borderlines on scientific research, you are probably going to fail - even if you figure out that critical algorithm, you still have to pour another year into building an actual business around it.

lukevdp• 14 years ago

"Me too" is fine but it is easier to sell when you have some niche that you serve better or some angle that is different.

I have a "me too" photography proofing product... but there is a type of customer where my product is the best solution available for them. My conversion rate for these people is very high.

Tichy• 14 years ago

Just don't copy Apple.

mtgx• 14 years ago

Unfortunately the patent system doesn't account for how business works in the real world - companies copy each other, and that's how competition is born. If everyone had to do everything 100% different, they wouldn't be competitors in the same market anymore. They would just create tens of other markets, where they'd be the only company making that type of product, and most of them would probably fail, because competition can actually be good for the first mover, especially if the idea is too crazy. They can validate his idea, and more people will switch to that idea of a product.

sbuk• 14 years ago

No, don't plagiarise Apple, or anyone else for that matter. There is a marked difference between plagiarising and a mee-too product.

bdunn• 14 years ago

There are lots of pizza restaurants because people like to eat pizza. A percentage of people like Harry's sauce over Mario's (features), and another group likes Mario's service (support) over Lucia's decor (UI). Or, more commonly, maybe Lucia's was discovered first by a few customers, and they remain a customer out of habit or predictability. Many of these pizzeria's can get a slice of the big pie of people who like pizza and do fairly well.

A few month's ago, a local spa popped up down the street that let people float around in big tanks of salt water for an hour. It was revolutionary - my corner of Virginia had never seen anything like it. But people would generally rather eat pizza than float about in salt water, and so they ended up going out of business in just a few months.

edanm• 14 years ago

My current advice for people going into Software Entrepreneurship is to create the simplest, easiest to build me-too company of all time - a Software Consultancy / Freelancing company. Nothing is as easy as having a product people want (programmer time) and just selling that directly. You'll learn a lot more about business than you would have learned by trying to start a failed product company, and you'll do it while getting actual money and real networking done.

almost• 14 years ago

It can be very difficult to start building projects when you already do freelance work though. It can be very distracting plus it's probably going to be a while before what you could earn from a product gets anywhere near what you are earning as a freelancer.

That said I don't necessarily think your advice is bad, it just depends what you want.

I say this as a freelancer currently working on some products as well.

Evbn3• 14 years ago

I hear people talk about this, and oDesk exists, but I never met someone who ever hired a general software freelancer. The closest is MSFT hiring a contractor, but that is just paperwork over flextime/short-term regular employment.

Maybe I just haven't been exposed to the self-selling side of this consulting.

vlasta2• 14 years ago

A "me-too" product may be fine when starting and your goal is to gain experience. It may also be fine to enter an under-served niche, where the users are not happy with the currently available products.

But if you enter a popular, saturated niche, you will suffer - you'll spend 95% of your time just catching up with the competitors. You'll spend time building bridges between your product and the competition. You would have to make hard choices whether to innovate or copy from competitor (and thus not forcing user to re-learn what they already knew). If you implement a feature users are requesting and the competitor does not have, people will not switch to your product because you are missing other features or because you have no way of contacting the users or because they are simply loyal to the competitor. You may win in the end, but it will cost you a lot - make sure you have more resources at your disposal than the best competitor has before you start.

cfontes• 14 years ago

I couldn't agree more... I don't live in the US and I usually feel the need of some of the services you guys have, like mint or Glassdoor or any other thing.

With one of those things I got so fed up that I build it with a friend, and sometimes when I see someone complaining about this problem that we have tried to solve and I tell them about my site every now and then I hear "Hum... that already exists in the US, that is nothing." all I can do is laugh.

Because I think that it doesn't matter at all if it already exists. I have build it because I enjoy building it I don't aim to be the next Twitter or Facebook even they didn't ( Orkut already existed BTW) and if it becomes a company or any other thing Great! otherwise I can point my finger at the screen and say "I build that from scratch" and that for me is worth a lot.

Evbn3• 14 years ago

It is GREAT if it already exists in a different market or language. That is proof that the idea is desirable. As long as the success isn't specific to the culture where it exists (so don't try a BBQ chain in Jerusalem), translate it to your market!

SeppoErviala• 14 years ago

There are also people who seem to systematically copy ideas from english-language-only or US-only web services and make a localized copies of them to some EU-countries.

Of course they might just come up with the same idea and find that there isn't a version in their first language, who knows.

Anyway, you can make an almost carbon copy me-too product to a new market and be successful.

mgkimsal2• 14 years ago

"Me-too" products are good. "Me-too" ideas that require network-effects to deliver value aren't, and that's a key difference I see with a lot of 'me-too' ideas that are destined to fail. It's not that you're copying an idea, but that you're trying to clone a network.

Being another time tracking tool has a pretty good chance of being successful, assuming the definition of success is profit. Being the next facebook has a pretty low chance of being successful, with any definition of success.

Bring on new time trackers, calendars, etc - people will flock to the execution and ideas that give them value, competitors will learn from each other and good ideas will get incorporated in various services and products. That's great. Build another social network system... unless you're serving an extremely targeted niche, nothing will happen.

gpcz• 14 years ago

I think the people advocating against "me too" companies had in mind the people who thought they could make a Facebook killer by copying them and adding that one extra feature/twist that would compel everyone to switch over.

I think the big lesson to learn here is to carefully evaluate the microeconomics of the market you want to get into. To compete as a bootstrapped startup, you'd want:

1) No/low barriers to entry 2) No/low switching costs 3) No/low network effects

So for the time tracker example, you can start the business for the price of web hosting, LLC paperwork and software development. However, you'd probably want to invest time to make it easy for customers to switch from competing services.

mgkimsal2• 14 years ago

agreed. however, imo, the big one that people overlook is the 'network effects' one. just as it would be appealing to be facebook, trying to become the next facebook is darn near impossible because of the network effects.

Getting someone to use your timetracker can be an uphill battle, but unless they're deriving value from other people using the same timetracker, you've got a fighting chance of at least convincing them to give it a try. But if much of the value they get from timetrackerX is that all their friends and clients are also on it, and they share time info around... it's extremely hard to even begin to compete with that, because it's not a feature you can replicate.

marklittlewood• 14 years ago

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philipalexander• 14 years ago

Me-too products become exceptional and differentiable when they are build better (i.e. with more taste) and the focus is put on the customer's experience. Since ideas are just multipliers (thank you Derek Sivers), it makes sense to master the execution of an idea on one you know people will buy.

jkaljundi• 14 years ago

One big difference is consumer vs enterprise / B2B products. Or to say it better, social products that need a network (eg Facebook, Twitter) and for everyone to use the one market leading service vs selecting a specific best product for your personal or team needs.

Most of us probably agree that having different task managers, bug trackers, CRM systems, programming languages, browsers, ERP systems (or even watches, monitors, displays, cars, t-shirts etc) is good. And there small improvements in me-too products can be great.

mise• 14 years ago

How does this work in the context of the book "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing"?

    > If you have a small market share and you have
    > to do battle with larger, better-financed 
    > competitors, then your marketing strategy was
    > probably faulty in the first place. You violated
    > the first law of marketing.
    >   The basic issue in marketing is creating a
    > category you can be first in.

dkrich• 14 years ago

> The basic issue in marketing is creating a category you can be first in.

This sounds good on paper, but is pretty much impossible to identify objectively in practice. Something can be "first" along many dimensions, so this depends entirely on how you categorize "first". First what? First productivity software, first document editor, or first document editor to offer WYSIWYG functionality? The only thing that really matters is being the first to offer a product that satisfies a customers needs on some dimension in a meaningful enough way for them to pay you money for it.

nhebb• 14 years ago

Coca-Cola is the top selling carbonated soft drink maker in the world, but PepsiCo still makes an awful lot of money.

“Me-too” products are fine

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