Y2K, gas shortages, December 21 2012, the Zombie Apocalypse… all high stakes social phenomena.
When stakes are high, people get irrational. We raid grocery stores for water. We make movies and Google “Mayan.” We spend hours in line to top off our tank at 4am. We buy guns.
Since we react instead of pro-act, hell breaks loose.
Business is the same.
Winner-take-all scenarios present themselves daily in Startup Land. Social networks are usual suspects because, due to the nature of user-generated content, there must be abundance to be utility. Chicken / egg and all that.
But too many winner-take-all contenders fight the MVB (minimum viable battle). They’d rather react from the sidelines, waiting until a formidable competitor “makes enough noise to be worth looking at.”
I say it’s easier to punch a baby than kill a man.
Facebook did this with Instagram; Microsoft with Hotmail; Yahoo with Flickr. Now everyone is falling over themselves with Snapchat at 100x the value for 1/100 of a product.
Snapchat was a fugly baby. It’s still fugly, just in adolescence. Someone should have murdered that bastard child. Instead they sat on their hands. Instead we let arrogance skew judgment.
So stop reacting and start building bomb shelters. Your competition is stealing all the bottled water.