Don't Be Afraid to Try Something Old for Your Next Project and Innovate

You’re in your second year of a computer science degree at a top university in 2004. Why did you choose a CS degree? Because you have a passion to build a great web startup. You read TechCrunch, GigaOm, and all the other tech blogs. So you think you know a little something about what makes a startup successful. You overhear one of your classmates talking about a new project he’s cooking up. You hear him say it’s a social network. Laughing under your breath you think to yourself Friendster and MySpace are already well-established encumbents in that market and are well on their way to capturing millions of users. OK, I’ll stop my lame story here as I’m sure you’ve all figured out what dorm room social network project at a top university I’m talking about. But while we all know how this story ends I thought it’d be interesting to look at why it even happened. Hey Zuckerberg, have you heard of friendster? This is the antognistic question you probably would have asked Mark after he excitedly told you about his idea. Where would we be if the prescence of well-established entities was enough to scare entrepeneurs away? We might not have ever heard of Facebook or even Google because they would never have been started. Most things are just tweaks on other things Think about this. Some of the most successful software is a variation of other, existing software. You could make the argument that Twitter is really just public instant messenging (a combination of IM statuses and messages) and they picked up where AOL left off. Microsoft Office is a variation of the office suites that paved the way for it. The camera apps in the App Store are tweaks on the native camera app. Twitter clients come in various flavors but at the end of the day they’re all fairly similar. I would venture a guess and offer the theory that the majority of software companies being publicly traded today did not invent their market segments but rather came in after someone else did. Here are some of the reasons why I think it makes a lot of sense to try something old, that has already been done before and tweak it for your next project. Validated market demand By picking a popular market segment you already know there is demand, a lot of demand. This is the most important variable in the “success formula” (don’t Google that made up phrase, I did and it’s all spam). Microsoft was famous for doing this. There is admittedly a stigma attached to this tactic but I think that stigma exists because of Microsoft’s harsh business strategies. Providing what is hopefully a better product and creating competition is the essence of innovation and should be looked on as a positive characteristic of capitilism. Since you aren’t having to focus your energy on creating and advertising a brand new market to people you can instead put your attention towards the product. Easy to understand Just as people used to compare Facebook to MySpace and Friendster (OK, maybe Friendster not too much) they will enivatably compare your project to other ones. Here is where you can use this to your advantage. Instead of that comparison being difficult and saying, “It’s a cross between YouTube and GroupOn”, you can say, “It’s like GroupOn, but for buying cars”. By the way, if somebody is working on group discount software for car dealerships hurry up and finish it because I’m looking to buy a new car soon. Back to the point though, people are easily distracted and won’t listen to you describe your idea. Their eyes will glaze over and they’ll start thinking about that funny video their friend sent them or the delicious New York-style reuben they had for lunch. If you can compare your product to something they not only already know but also have a strong positive feeling towards and in the same sentence tell them how you offer something that other product doesn’t, bingo! Drafting isn’t just for race cars In racing, which I admit I know very little about, there’s something known as drafting. Drafting or slipstreaming is a technique where two vehicles or objects align in a close group reducing the overall effect of drag due to exploiting the lead object's slipstream. Follow behind the leader and you can go faster with less effort. Choosing a popular category or product and competing with it directly can put you in its slipstream and magnify the success you would get otherwise. You can’t just copy If you’re still reading to this point you might be thinking I’m proposing you simply copy something someone else is doing or change a few things about it. I’m not. That won’t work. It won’t work because you need to offer a compelling, unique reason to use your product. That’s a difficult thing to do, reallly difficult. So this is where your innovation is needed. Plenty of inspiration You have plenty of inspiration to draw on by choosing a well-established segment. Do some research. Try using the other products. Use them every day. Figure out what you like and don’t like about them. Still lots of room to innovate There will be things you like about each of the competitors in the space you’re going to enter. Putting the various bits and pieces together in a new and unique combination is innovation. Often times it can be the small adjustments or combinations of features that can make the next big hit. Firefox is a great example of this. Firefox started life as a stripped down version of Mozilla’s popular web browser. It’s big feature was that it lacked a lot of the bloat that had crept into other web browsers. The rest is history. Whether you’re a first time entrepeneur or wanting to start your fifth company I recommend you look for an existing market with an existing product that is ripe for innovation. Start there and see where it takes you. My own project, Talentopoly, is like Hacker News and Reddit but the links are strictly on the topics of programming, design, and IT.