How Three Germans Are Cloning the Web
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
But those of us who live in Europe sometimes get absolutely infuriated by US-based startups who go for years ignoring potential non-US customers. I'm sure Fab.com would have eventually rolled out to Europe, but in the meantime I'm happy that someone else built a product that solves the same problem.
Sometimes this is a real regulatory problem, like anything to do with banking/payments/etc. But oftentimes it's just because businesses don't seem to like taking on the extra work/complexity of thinking internationally.
So while I don't like their pure copycat methods (down to page layouts), I think they're serving a valuable purpose in the marketplace.
Still I don't get why not expanding aggressively globally, as the code base exists and the cost of delivering in additional countries should be marginal for most. Too much VC money flowing in maybe?
When things are changing rapidly and getting new features, localizing and testing that many locales is a large time sink.
I'd say l10n and i18n are handled pretty well by pretty much all major web frameworks. Extra work yes, extra testing yes, but unless you've built your app in some insanely obscure way, I can't imagine how localizing it would be more costly than acquiring a copycat competitor, 6 months later?
I believe the obstacles must be more political and operational, not technical.
2. Server resources to host globally
3. Legal costs to maintain compliance with all laws across borders yet still deliver the same product everywhere.
It's not trivial to globalize a business, even on the web. Look at how much trouble Google is getting into every year from various countries.
Legal issues can be a problem for certain services, but I see many services for which that is of absolutely no concern. Do you see any major legal issue for let's say, Quora or Stackoverflow?
Google only got into trouble after they became big enough to have a physical presence in various countries, plus they have taken up the ill-advised strategy of flipping the bird to non-US authorities.
There are serious logistical problems to tackle, not even counting getting it all running and bug-free for every use case in every language with ever data format possible. It's a huge setback, especially if you stand to gain nothing significant from being worldwide.
In general the non-technical part is more complicated like localized user Services.
Like you say, if they're not serving the market, then somebody else should.
So, maybe it's time for a new (?) kind of job, the New Market Facilitator (or helper or.. feel free to find a better matching english term for it): a person that could be contacted to evaluate a specific market (i.e. a country), that can deal with localization, local laws etcetera.
What do you think?
PS if anyone is interested in launching their service in Italy, feel free to contact me at startup.in.italy@gmail.com (freshly made :D)
We even launched a Catalan version, and the cost of doing a translation was well worth the PR it generated for even (or maybe especially) a minor market like that.
“I think the most admirable entrepreneurs are those with original ideas, ja? It’s a unique gift that you either have or you don’t. Just as we might have a very good gift of execution, others have a unique gift for the purest form of innovation.”
The constant mantra of HN is "ideas are useless, execution is everything". So why the hate against these guys?
It's one thing to say "I want to make a site where people can rent out their spare rooms, I saw some other site do it", it's quite another to say "look at airbnb.com, copy that". When the exact execution is the same (even down to page layouts) you're not actually contributing anything yourself.
The point of having a business is to make money, not to save the world or be original. Thats a luxury of very few people.
So without trying to defend the guys, I would say. Welcome to the real world.
Copying is 99% of most businesses as it should be I guess.
airbnb werent the first to come up with this concept they just happende to be the ones who became successful with it.
I am not trying to defend the germans and I am not trying to take anything away from the airbnb guys.
Just that it seems a tad removed from reality to not value that a company is able to make money by being fast executioners of proven ideas.
I wouldn't do it myself, I value originality as much as the next guy. But are what they are doing really that despicable?
yes, but in todays world if you are not solving a problem ("save the world"), then your business most likely will not make money.
Is Facebook solving a problem out there? Or are they solving a problem they created themselves.
Many businesses are build around this concept and the lines between solving problems and creating a demand are rather blurry.
See the lines are rather blurry. Ultimately everything can be argued as solving a problem. But that is IMO a very unproductive way of looking at things.
I like the "art" of building businesses and I'm nos sure I'm OK with what they do They are turning the art into an assembly line - all their ventures have high commonality - from information technology to business processes - and that should make them very efficient.
Actually, my sense of HN is that, relatively to many other startup communities appreciation skews towards ideas.
And I'm not seeing that much hate on this thread.
Erm... I don't think copying successful business is very risky. You can, of course, bork execution, but the key part - exploring the "needspace" and finding a viable business model - is already done. And even executing, when someone executed before, is rather easy.
As said by others, there are language, cultural and legal differences.
EDIT (missed a piece): Execution is not only design and coding, it's also verifying the market, adapting the product to this market etc..
note: i'm not justifing them (at least not completely), just making some point.
I'm working on creating a better Startup Community end Environment in my surrounding, not only because i'd like that to be here, but also because i'd like to show that there is a another, if not better, way to do this.
Is the price that companies such as GroupOn pay equivalent to the cost of localising their own offering? Maybe so and it may be a good deal.
Of course, with things like deals sites and so on, you might need to have localised sales organisations busy in each supported market.
But I wonder how many startups simply choose the English language/US market to minimise complexity and risk? (Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but it does open the door to copycats)
What doublespeak. Startups are 99% execution. All successful startup founders are "execution entrepreneurs." All that really distinguishes the Samwers is that they copy existing ideas, and there are already names for people who do that.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3658797
> there was nothing revolutionary about Dropbox. There were already dozens of similar things
Neither do you.
It's the literal copying of the designs without adding anything novel that I have a problem with. Case in point:
Now if they were churning out half-assed businesses just to capitalize on something that is currently trendy/popular then that's a different story. Just look at the Android market, it is full of copies of original indie games that came out on iOS first.
Honest question: What name is that? (English is not my first language.)
And since I cannot quite interpret the tone of your comment I have to ask bluntly: Do you find it okay what the Samwers do?
I don't like what they do. It's ok to take an existing idea and adapt it. E.g. to try to make a web-based version of a desktop app. But there is something contemptible about copying something so literally that you even copy the mistakes.
They have a history of making money by, if not illegal, at least morally questionable means, and got in trouble with the unions about treatment of employees...
I personally think it's distasteful to rip off a website design directly, but if they can launch a proven business model in Europe quicker than the American originators (or because the American company can't/won't go international), why not? Imitation is the greatest form of flattery and all that.
"In Germany you won't find venture capitalists, just capitalists."
And the Samwers seem to have taken this really literally.
People generally won't argue when good ideas are cloned between competing products, and praise the competition.
In the same way it's ok to write a theatre play in which the love between two people is contrasted by their families, but putting "wherefore art thou Romeo?" in the dialogs would seem bad.
Now we can answer why it is that way. Why do these comedians shun peers who steal jokes? Well the first reason is that it leads to crap. So, this sometimes happens with movies that are intended as comedies: ten different creative voices all try to push the jokes in a certain direction, and what you get is not extremely funny to 10% of the population -- which would be success -- but is only a little funny to 100% of the population -- which is a failure. So by taking someone else's joke and mixing it into a hodgepodge of other material, it stops being so funny as when it appears in the context that it's supposed to be in.
But I think a second reason is that we nurture ideas. It takes effort to turn an absurd concept into a good joke, and it takes effort to take an abstract idea like "coding with other people" and turn it into GitHub. When a comedian tells someone else's joke, there is a false pretense that they have spent all of this work to develop that joke for themselves -- and they haven't done any of it. When Eddie Izzard says, "This is my friend's Christopher Walken impersonation, and I'm nicking it, and he knows that," he's disavowing this aspect of the joke, and therefore it's more acceptable and can be used in his routine without too many eyebrows raised. The frustration is with people who steal almost every joke and achieve success with that -- not with people who steal one or another joke when they think it deserves to live on.
They copy a site, claim a userbase in Germany/Europe, then sell the site back to the people they imitated. It reeks of "go away" money.
The reason the Samwer story is so weird is a) there's so much damn money in their game (Groupon, Facebook, etc.) and b) they're generally regarded to be ruthless, cut-throat, slave-drivers.
I know I'd feel differently about the phenomenon if they seemed less like idea-pirates and more like contributors to innovation.
Don't we at HN usually say that it's the people that are most important? If culture is destiny, then the Samwers' copying of website layouts is the least of what's wrong here.
Just to put some of this into perspective.