Firstly, don't characterize competition as a 8MM gorilla, when they are a startup.
Second, don't worry about competition. Focus on your users. Listen to them. Iterate rapidly. Add features request by your early users.
The other way to think about it is the facebook > twitter status update* as a product. Taking one component of a successful product and making it a product.
* comparisons to fb might not be completely accurate since one of the founders, apparently had the idea for twitter when folks were updating their IM clients.
> comparisons to fb might not be completely accurate since one of the founders, apparently had the idea for twitter when folks were updating their IM clients.
I had the idea for twitter back in 1998, but I didn't do anything with it, neither did the founder of facebook... Ideas mean nothing without execution.
It's amazing how much money rich organizations can waste, and how much time they can spend on the wasting.
They can get tempted to reinvent a better wheel for $$$, rather than reusing existing wheels for cheap; then they get sucked into a time/money sink of epic proportions while the simpler solution grows like a weed.
$8MM is a lot of money but that doesn't mean it will be spent wisely. During the dot-com days I worked for a company that had $30MM in funding and pissed every cent of it away.
Second, don't worry about competition. Focus on your users. Listen to them. Iterate rapidly. Add features request by your early users.
The other way to think about it is the facebook > twitter status update* as a product. Taking one component of a successful product and making it a product.
* comparisons to fb might not be completely accurate since one of the founders, apparently had the idea for twitter when folks were updating their IM clients.