Should I worry about tech giants?

If you think these companies can replicate your business in just a few days then you have certainly never worked at one of them. These companies are extremely slow, everything is extremely bureaucratic and requires dozens of useless meetings with PMs, coffee breaks, pointless planning sessions, off-sites, and whatnot. It takes months, if not years, to start getting traction on a project at these projects.

It's true that they might out-pace you in the long term (at which point you might be already big enough to not need to truly worry about this), but in the short term your advantage as a solo/smaller founder that is not constrained by corporate bureaucracy is so absurd that I guarantee you that they are the ones who are afraid of you. Go for it!

I have this fear pretty often. My view at this point is that incumbents almost always end up with a bloated product. The pressure to add new features, expand the team, and to grow at any cost just produces crappy products eventually. At this point, the plucky hacker arrives with a small feature-set that's polished and loved and manages to capture a portion of the market.

As an example, plausible.io is a success despite building a subset of Google Analytics. While they're privacy-focused and good at content marketing, I like using them because they offer a far simpler, more polished experience than GA.

Here's a simple test: 1) Is it a small niche?
If yes, they probably won't enter the market as it's too small.

It seems to me that you should narrow down supply to a specific type of content creator to make it easier for you to get started.

Additionally, I think you need to have some answers/pointers to these questions:

• is there a type of content creator that is currently underserved/hard to discover by popular apps and platforms?
• how are you planning to find/reach out to these content creators?
• what's in it for creators to be members of your directory?
• how would you acquire users?
• what makes your product sticky to these users?

I understand your concerns but I feel you need to further explore the problem space to determine if your idea is viable.

Good luck!

I mean, TikTok is still alive and well in the Western market even though Facebook/Instagram had the time and money to remake TikTok so quickly.

If your company is the reason they remade your platform, then you have nothing to worry about. Chances are you're big enough, you just need to keep going and not give up.

That being said, if they do the EXACT same thing, long before you've taken any real hold on your audience, then it's something to worry about.

Speed coupled with quality is a key factor when it comes to the success of start ups. I highly recommend that you still give a shot. Bigger companies won't be able to replicate your speed due to bureaucratically red tape : at least at the start

Is your idea core to their offering? If not, it will always be an afterthought for them, leaving room for you to create something that solves that "job to be done" better.

It is honestly hard to predict whether tech giants will copy a product. Vine was a massive hit, yet nobody copied them. Once tiktok came around and started taking market share in the social media space, then everyone is clamoring to implement short-form video. But they are too late, and tiktok is still iterating and beating them.

Lesson: tech giants may or may not copy. Who knows!

Hm, it depends. What's $$$$ to you, is 0 to them. However, yes, if you can be copied easily that's a problem - whether by tech giants or mini tech giants. It's why SaaS is a struggle - try charging for something and then your larger, more funded competitor offers the same thing for free - to gain marketshare.

Watch this video -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Fq15k9QPv8

Seriously Garry Tan is the new head of YC, and he explains very well why you shouldn't worry about tech giants.

I think it depends largely on what your actual feature is. Yes they could replicate your business, the real question is, WILL they? Is it an obvious and valuable improvement for their existing product? Does it help them do better at their high level goals? Does it synergize with the other products under their brand?

There's a lot of features that users want, that big tech will never deliver. Maybe it goes against their master plans or maybe it cannibalizes one of their other products. "Blind spot" features like that are great targets for small creators to build.

Only until you get big enough, at which point they might want to acquire you if anything.

From my POV you shouldn't because, we all re building different products

The creator economy is enormous... can you elaborate on your idea and why you think your competitor is TikTok etc.?

Thank u for the feedback guys. I guess the key takeaways are the following:

• Niche focus
• Identify clearly what's in for the target
• Spot what the giants suck at in delivering value to the niche I am targeting (like GA with privacy)

Another example that comes up in my mind is Twitch: they could have questioned themselves if Youtube could easily copy. We know the answer. I also think that less tangible differentiators like brand positioning and ToV could justify the coexistence of two value propositions.