Prelude: This post spawned a little controversy among the team. Telling the world about our competitors when they have products ready to use and we don’t? A case can certainly be made for why that’s a bad idea.
At the end of the day though, obviously, we decided to publish. Here’s why:
- See the post’s title
- What’s the point of being transparent and contributing to the greater startup consciousness if we’re not going to share the good stuff? Like, how we think about differentiating from existing competitors.
The video above walks through a common scenario on three of our competitor’s websites: TopTenReviews, AlternativeTo and Web2Review (it’s one thing to give them press, it’s another to give them link juice).
The gist of our video tour is:
Online services are not restaurants. Directories + community != recommendations. Users need a way to express their specific business needs, and get recommendations that address those.
Now, will we be able to execute better than our competitors? No clue. 3 Weeks to Live is about testing hypotheses. We’ve got some ideas on what the right formula might be, but we really don’t know until we try them out.
We really want to know what you guys think on this post.
- What other competitors have you seen?
- If you were going to create a competitive offering in this space, how would you go about it?
PS – Big thanks to @benferris for the pointer to Web2Review.
3 Weeks to Live 
Jan 20, 2011 @ 15:36:19
Also came across this the other day; not quite developed as much as the ones you’ve mentioned. http://cloudomatic.com/
Jan 20, 2011 @ 21:51:44
Thanks Jim, cloudomatic is interesting and I almost put them in the video, not because of their directory, but Cloudomatic(flow) their proposed plug-and-play affiliate program seemed like a great idea. http://flow.cloudomatic.com/
Jan 20, 2011 @ 21:40:37
> What other competitors have you seen?
Twitter. I’m not trying to be snarky, but this is the first place I try for recommendations for web services.
Also, a bit of topic but it would be great if you could upload videos at a higher resolution. No need to stick to 360p these days 🙂
Jan 20, 2011 @ 21:47:27
Not snarky at all – there are plenty of competitors we didn’t list, twitter is one of them. Good to hear from more folks like you who use it for recommendations though!
Re video quality, noted. I usually just roll with the setting Camstudio defaults for the YouTube upload. Got too much to do to have to save the videos off as special files and them upload them manually, but I’ll see if there’s a quick way to change that setting.
Thanks for taking the time!