Does it matter to be the best and to be first to win on the internet? The short answer is no.
The best pizza is not the most successful
A few weeks ago i discovered a new pizzeria that opened down my street. It arrived way after my favorite pizza shop a few meters away, but was already packed from the morning to late at night. Attracted by the crowd, i checked it out and went to order a pizza. It was not much cheaper, but a little big bigger. Now here is the interested bit: it is the worst or one of the worst pizzas i have ever eaten at all levels (ingredients, paste, sauce,...) and obviously people did not care. But the service was great and owners are eager to be nice. The other interesting part: the restaurant is NEVER empty.
What can we learn from that? people don t care about the best. people care about what's good enough for them. This restaurant is currently winning over my favorite because it is offering a product and a service that is matching people's expectations. It is not winning because it was first nor because it has the best product.
From my personal experience the same happens on the web. With a twist. When we launched LuckyVillage.com in France back in 2000, we were the very first to introduce the concept of Free lottery. A few weeks later we were 6 startups doing the same, some of them massively backed when we only raised 1m euros. Who was the winner? not the biggest, not the lottery with the best product (ours we believe, although we had an exit) but a very small company handled carefully, not vc backed, that arrived late and that was patient enough to see all of us out of the race. It is now one of the biggest casual play company in Europe.
When we launched Topify.com, we discovered a few days before that a competing service was out there (we were there actually much before but in closed teasing mode) much simpler, with less features. Why did they initially win? because Kevin Rose and a few others spotted them and promoted them. It drove them massive traffic. We know, although we had a much better product we could not win on traffic race. We were not first, and we were not the hottest. So we decided to fight on another field: patience, scale and customer service. Bingo! The competing service suffered serious downtimes and we were there to collect frustrated users and answer all request (which they were not doing), We were even offered to acquire them, which we declined. If you run a search on Topify you ll discover how happy our users are
Arriving first does not matter, having the best product does not matter.
In a couple of weeks, i will launch a new side project i have been working on very remotely for 3 months called project "TD". I discovered last week a competing service was launched, which honestly is pissing me off a little because we could have been first since all is ready, but for family reasons i had to delay the launch. It also gained major expositons from some big blogs. So are we done? We don't think so, not because our product is much better (although it is). But because their customer experience is poor and their model broken form day 1 (which they could fix..)..well you ll tell me when you see it.
Conclusion
The web is not a sport race: winning does not mean arriving first or being the best. Twitter won over services that were way better in terms of features and design and launched before them. Google wins on search engines that offer a better experience. Skype wins over any VOIP service although it arrived late. MySpace wins over 10s of Social networks way better designed. And the list could be very long.
There is a mix of winning factors: being first and having the best product are 2 of them but are not the most important. In my view here are some that are much more important: Listen and care (really) for customers, Speed of execution, speed of everything, pace of innovation, patience and consistency (you don t have to be the best all the time, but good all the time), design to scale, attention to details, site experience (not necessarily design), care for simplicity over feature set.
This is what i like to call execution and most of it is not AT ALL visible on a site when you look at it (of course if your site is crap...well... go sell pizzas)
ps: i have purposely took off the debate any business model related issue that will part of a different post. But yes monetizing is also a winning factor. But on the web it is not the most important one when you launch
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