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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

"Competition is not a key source of concern to your small business" might be a better title, and I totally endorse it. BCC was cloned at least five times, AR at least once. (I don't mean "Someone entered the market" I mean "Someone literally had an oDesk project whose description was 'Create a clone of bingocardcreator.com.'")

You could barely it happened from the inside perspective, since the effect of competition was dominated by e.g. the business cycle, the whims of the Google gods, and my health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses.

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People tried to clone Bingo Card Creator because you meticulously documented it being capable of bringing in small profits, and because there are some particularly lazy and stupid people out there -- the type who would post a want ad to "Create a clone of bingocardcreator.com." They read your popular blog, and in their stupidity thought they could use it as a recipe to make $X/year. I agree that they represent some form of competition, but that it is the weakest kind imaginable. Like you said, BCC succeeded on the back of "health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses." Without those things it scarcely could've turned any profit, let alone year after year, which is what makes your story so compelling. But I'm not sure it's a useful lesson about the supposed small threat of competition.

I have a smallish site that brings in between 5k and 10k in revenue each month. I have not documented anything about it anywhere. AFAIK we were first of the kind. There are new direct clones popping up all the time, I know of at least four now, and one in particular has to be outspending our ad budget by at least 3x.

People will "steal" your idea as soon as they believe that it will be profitable to do so, even if you don't write blog posts about it. You have to realize that it's not theft to compete, it's just competition. If you started a chicken restaurant, some guy who opened the first chicken restaurant wouldn't have any claim to shut you down. Competition is part of business, and there's no doubt it's made our offering much better and provided motivation that is hard to drum up without an externality. Competition is good, even if it's often unpleasant.

Some of that is a structural difference between sites which are built on paid traffic and sites that use SEO / brand.

Paid traffic is live by the sword, die by the sword; you can spin up a large audience fairly quickly using your checkbook but the next guy (with a large checkbook) can go outbid you. Boom, traffic drops. Blogging about paid traffic or how to improve conversion rates is suicidal.

The funny thing about SEO-based traffic models is Google is often very conservative about handing over the top spots if you're established in the niche. Established incumbents get the benefit of the doubt (from an algorithm perspective) in many major searches; I've seen old sites with very weak SEO and outdated offerings stand off new entrants (who execute better on the product & SEO fronts) for YEARS despite no content changes or link building.

Given that blogging usually helps your site rankings by a) feeding Google fresh content and b) earning a few backlinks and the most interesting story about a boring site is often how you promote it.... the extra kick from blogging may be the edge you need to stay on top in an SEO-driven category.

(obviously, if your initial SEO success was from buying 500 links from a black hat private blog network, you may want to keep your mouth shut....)

patio11's career was completely built on blogging about conversion rates and SEO. Of course, he sells that advice too, not just bingo cards.

Theft is a genuine option that some choose to take. However, it can also be attributable to a cross-roads of ideas that emerge at the same time. Often, A product (or products) enable another product. Other times, ideas are rediscovered (eg. Luck, influence through a TV show). As you said though, the competition is good for us all. If someone is asleep at the wheel, someone else will take over.

Ezell's Chicken actually had a lawsuit about that. Ezell sold the company and then opened a new chicken joint.

To the extent that BCC was reliant on SEO and paid conversions... let's say you'd told someone the idea 6 months before you had availability to actually execute. Do you think the competitor could've established a beachhead?

For example, they'd have 6 months' lead on SEO, and on the paid acquisition channels they'd have either (a) CPC and LTV data that you'd still be guessing on; and (b) the ability to keep your bids arbitrarily high while you're still spinning up.

In other words: I think your sentiment is valid if you're both executing right now... but there's certainly some first-mover advantage.

So the scenario is that on January 1st 2006 someone comes out of a time machine to a young programmer and says "Hello world plus a random number generator is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Believe it! Start your SEO engines now!" And that programmer actually starts competently executing on that, because time lords are known to be trusty, benevolent, and curiously forgetful of all the many, many more lucrative messages that could be sent given that opportunity?

Then yes, that would have been problematic, I guess?

The more meaningful question to me seems "Does BCC's modest success necessarily mean that the operators of pre-BCC competitors were worse off?" In the large, I'm thinking "Nope." DLTK Cards (no reason any of you would have heard of them, but its a mom-and-pop operation which does a variety of school printables, including bingo cards) is still up there and probably still worth several tens of thousands of dollars in AdSense revenue a year. (Might even be six figures.)

I think it would be unlikely. I remember the first time I heard about BCC. I could not believe anyone was making money from an idea like that. Bingo cards for teachers. Well, first of all teachers don't typically have a lot of spare money. They aren't generally thought of as spendthrifts. Many of them are already spending their own money on classroom supplies, and I'm supposed to get them to spend more? My thought would be that the only way to make money selling to educators is to sell to school districts. That sounds a lot like enterprise sales, only probably even more political. Doesn't seem like a very lucrative idea.

So I don't think the idea would have appealed to very many people to begin with. Even fewer would have had the motivation to actually create the product and do the work to market it, and go through the effort of A/B testing idea after idea to figure out the best way to sell it. And even if they had, the world is a big place. No business has a lock on 100% of its market.

The idea is something, but it's hardly the whole enchilada.

I agree. I was going to get into this in the next post, but actually it seems that the pie has just gotten bigger along with these competitors (http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22japanese%20candy%2...), and it doesn't seem to be impacting the subscriber numbers.

Could you steal ideas from your competitors or JV?

I might. Now that I wrote this post I feel a bit better about being able to do that and still continue this "business experiment" blogging.

Yes, although small business might be an operative word. I'm thinking of Germany's Samwer brothers who have had great success in cloning successful US startups:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/07/31/samwer-brothe...

Then again, they're not copying ideas as much as successful implementations.

And they aren't directly competing with the original, they are creating a local-friendly variant, which users appreciate.

"You could barely it happened from the inside perspective, since the effect of competition was dominated by e.g. the business cycle, the whims of the Google gods, and my health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses."

If a larger company had a larger budget and larger team than yours, BCC would have been crushed. However, there is little money in the business (If I recall, it was making ~#2500/month before you sold it) and it's most likely not worth the effort for so little return for a larger company. In most parts of the world $2500 is barely enough for one person to survive.

"Competition is not a key source of concern to your small business"

If your business is in an extremely small market, I agree. However, as soon as it seems like you are making money, competitors will come sniffing around and if they have a better plan than you, can put you out of business. I've seen it many times at small companies. They ignore the competition and suddenly find themselves going bankrupt because the majority of their customers left.

Did you ever see any of these? Were either the implementation or the presentation and promotion any good?

Did any of them ever change what you did or delivered to compete?

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