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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I’d like to see some examples of this, I’ve never heard of the fast follow working but happy to be corrected. The thing is they will not have access to your metrics to know the rate of growth and as we all know most amazing startups look like bad ideas on the surface. Take for example something like Substack - it should be easy to copy but they already have a moat in terms of mindshare with writers so I’d say there isn’t much point. Basically by the time you’re thinking about copying something that has product market fit it’s already too late for you to be the incumbent.

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I'm no expert here but I thought it was the other way around. I remember seeing Rocket Internet clone several US based startups in the European market successfully. Either in selling them back to the original startup or dominating the market e.g. Zalando

I worked for Rocket Internet for 6 months one year and if you get beaten by them you deserve to lose. You can safely forget about them if you are good.

I was approached by Rocket internet to be a CEO of one of their companies and after asking me the type of company I wouldn't be interested in (I said "health/beauty, B2C") they still went on to offer me the role of CEO of a B2C teeth straightening company

Utterly bizarre, they weren't listening to a word I said yet wanted me to lead one of their companies?!

The idea that Substack have a moat seems a bit implausible, given how new they are.

Have they finished displacing Medium yet? Who in turn only appeared a few years ago?

Have any normal people even heard of these companies?

Ask any writer you know about substack, they have mind share that the competition will struggle to catch. It's a moving target remember, first you have to launch, then you have to get a load of a-list writers on your platform, then you have to figure what new thing is going to get you users. This will take you at least 6 months maybe longer. By then Substack should be at least 6 months ahead of you maybe more.

Substack is winning because of business model innovation, and also because of market timing. Their technology isn't really an advantage compared to legacy CMS platforms - how they are employing that technology is the difference.

Medium went for a bottom-up approach, trying to monetize the content of the crowd. Substack is going for a top-down approach, grabbing writers with an existing large following and paying them top rates, which are justified by the conversion rates for their well-known creators.

Normal people might not have heard of these companies, but niche audiences certainly follow some of the specific authors/columnists/influencers and are following them onto substack with paid subscriptions.

Is that a moat, or will they jump to the next platform? A few have been poached by the NYT and other venues, so maybe the moat isn't that big.

Yes, that's why Google doesn't exist and Altavista rules world search.

It's actually much more complex than a post on hacker news could summarise here, but I will say AltaVista tried to compete with Yahoo and add features rather than compete with Google.

If you think Google was a fast follower you are incorrect. There are patterns to how these types of company crop up and they are about revolutions in how a field is done rather than "copy AltaVista" and see if you can catch them. Nobody succeeds at copying a company that has a genuine mission to accomplish.

I'm not saying it's impossible to build a company that happens to do the same thing as say Substack but you have to build it for the correct reasons and fast followers are generally always compromised in some way.

Your glib suggestion that Google, a once per decade company, is a follower of AltaVista really doesn't do any of what Google accomplished justice.

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