Big ideas from small tasks
What do these sites have in common?
They are all large and successful sites that help their users complete a number of tasks. There are a ton of competitors that go after these specific sites and look at what they have to offer and say they can offer everything they offer and more. In fact, they can do it better. The problem is there has to be something blatantly wrong with these sites for a competitor to match them feature-for-feature and take their customers.
The flaw in this logic is you probably can do everything your competitor can do, but how much better can you really do all of that stuff? Wouldn’t it be easier to simply do one thing better than them and become the focus of that?
For example, what do these sites have in common?
They all do something that the first three sites do, but they made that their focus. They found one task that they felt they could do a lot better than their competition (whether they were actually thinking of the competition or not) and they are succeeding. Now whether that is how they methodically planned it out I am not sure, but that is how it turned out for them.
The premise behind BullieBoard! had been in my head for a very long time. I always wanted a site that could show me the clubs and bars in Tampa and what they had going on tonight. I could never find it. My original ideas were very similar to what Club Planet offered in its select cities. For one reason or another I never went through with the idea.
Then this year while sitting at a bar with a friend of mine we began discussing the idea of the site again. All of these great features came up, club reviews, user profiles, pictures, music, etc. Now when you drink and discuss ideas they start to become really good ideas in your head. When I got home I looked at sites that offer such things and although none of them were great in my mind, they did the job.
Something kept bugging me about the sites though and that was the fact I couldn’t just see what is happening tonight. There was so much clutter and useless information that trying to plan my night became a chore. I realized that all I ever wanted was a site that told me what is happening tonight. So simple.
So now instead of a super club social network, I was having dreams of an event site. However, those used to be a dime a dozen during the first dotcom boom so I had to go out and see what they offered. They certainly did the task of letting me know the events happening in Tampa, but the problem was they let me know almost every event that was happening in Tampa. It could be a simple meetup at a restaurant or a bridge tournament in a bingo parlor. You had to know exactly what you were looking for, search for it and pray you got the right results. A ton of great features were added to these events, but nothing I would use.
If I was going to create an event site that did what I wanted I was going to have to do it myself. A problem arose though. I remembered Craigslist had a section for community events. Well that was just a giant clusterfuck of everything under the sun, but I did take away a few lessons from Craigslist so it wasn’t completely useless.
I can’t outdo Upcoming, Eventful or Craigslist by doing everything they do. I can only do what my main focus is to the best of my abilities and I just need that to be a ton better than those sites and I am succeeding.
So if you are creating a product or service and looking at the competition don’t setup a spreadsheet to see what features you can match them with, see what features you don’t care about that they have, scratch them off and go from there. Look at the couple of features you offer and make those killer. That is how you will change the game.
I would love to hear some other examples that you can think of where a competitor took what the competition did and stripped it away.