I am beginning to think there is no way to avoid it. Every time we launch a new product feature at MyBlogLog, someone (usually multiple someones) tells me the new feature will kill another company. In the past month I have heard, “This new feature is…”
- a Digg killer.
- a Technorati killer.
- a FriendFeed killer.
- a Socialthing killer.
- a MySpace killer.
- a Facebook killer.
- and a dozen more I am forgetting.
Aside from thinking the person telling me this is on crack, I usually have a few additional thoughts. First, there is enough killing in the world already; we don’t need to add to it. Second, as people around Yahoo! are painfully aware, I am a natural born startup guy. I truly respect every person that lets the entrepreneurial spirit grab them and follows through to start a company. I want them to succeed. (I think that any startup team I have spoken with will attest to the fact that I will do anything I can to help them. Please feel free to ping me if there is anything I can do for your startup.) Third, part of being an entrepreneur is knowing that your new startup is going to change direction several hundred times on the way to its final destination. Just because there are similarities in a current feature set does not mean the companies are heading in a similar direction. (MyBlogLog started as outgoing click tracking!) Fourth, if the services are similar, there is plenty of room for competition. Finally, if we have created a new feature, it has next to nothing to do with competing with existing services. We do try to learn from what others are doing. But if we add a feature, it is because it is the right thing to do for our users.
In the end, I don’t want any feature we build to kill another company. I just want the feature to be killer.
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