No. It may have been smart to let this idea go, but "Google entered the space" is not generally a good reason to give up.
For niche products, small companies are often in a surprisingly good position to compete with Google (or pretty much any giant company).
Advantages small companies have:
* Much easier to change feature/function/benefit and packaging to adapt to the market
* Not competing with revenue from 1000 other internal projects for staffing
* Similarly: can sustain a business with tiny beachhead markets that Google can't waste time capturing
It seems like people immediately realize that Google can own tiny markets (obviously, if you can own the whole market, you should be able to capture any subset of it), but don't realize that in practice Google won't capture small niches, because it's irrational for them to deploy engineers to earn $10 when those same engineers can be deployed to earn $100 somewhere else.
Also: just because you have all the resources of Google doesn't mean you're going to stick the landing on every project you start. On niche products, it's not only possible but actually kind of likely that you can out-execute Google.
That doesn't make live gaming videos a great new startup idea. Just be careful of the logic that says "Google entered a space and so now it's dead".
I was in Microsoft, part of an org which pulled in billions of dollars in double digits annually. When doing planning and visioning exercise, time and again we would never focus on scenarios which seemed to be ‘trivial’ (translating to hundreds of millions dollar revenue oppurtunity), as we had limited headcount and finite amount of time to execute.
Startups don’t realize how constrained are the product teams in big organizations, much more than many startups. Every headcount, every contract worker (if they are allowed at all) need to be fought for. And then there is bureaucracy - post planning and spec’ing it is impossible to do any sort of minor pivot, once the juggernaut starts rolling there is no stopping, no room for even a pause to evaluate a new threat.
I’m not an expert of gaming by any stretch and I’m sure the founders decided on best course of actions based upon their priorities but looking at the YouTube Gaming page (http://youtube-global.blogspot.in/2015/06/a-youtube-built-fo...), YouTube seem to be aiming for something which is natural extension of what was already happening in YouTube: “More than 25,000 games will each have their own page, a single place for all the best videos and live streams about that title. You’ll also find channels from a wide array of game publishers and YouTube creators.”
I thought the founders were right when they said YouTube Gaming launch is a validation. I’m sure in the initial days YouTube Gaming org would be taking small steps and would try to consolidate what is already happening in YouTube but perhaps in a disjointed fashion. Go for easy discoverability etc.
In this situation I would assume that there would be plenty of scenarios left uncovered which an innovative startup can solve for (which initially YouTube Gaming would be incapable of paying attention to due to resource constraints - people, time - however compelling they may be).
And hey, one could always build something with acquisition in mind - an acquisition by Google (YouTube gaming) wouldn’t have been a bad way to get validated in the end.
Exactly. The platform will matter, but in this case the content is going to be king. Users are going to wherever the best content is. I saw the OP as being in a position to be able to complete with Google to provide quality content. That's not a bad position to be in. And that long tail can be really long with a lot of content that Google and others won't deal with.
I have heard several times how actually having some competition helps companies quite often. It's not automatically the end if someone else has a similar offering.
I think JoeAltm meant OP was smart to give up an idea he probably wouldn't have been able to follow through on at, the time he did. Or at least that's how I read it.
Yes, I did too. And I'm saying: it isn't universally, or even usually, the case that Google giving something away destroys any market for selling something similar.
For niche products, small companies are often in a surprisingly good position to compete with Google (or pretty much any giant company).
Advantages small companies have:
* Much easier to change feature/function/benefit and packaging to adapt to the market
* Not competing with revenue from 1000 other internal projects for staffing
* Similarly: can sustain a business with tiny beachhead markets that Google can't waste time capturing
It seems like people immediately realize that Google can own tiny markets (obviously, if you can own the whole market, you should be able to capture any subset of it), but don't realize that in practice Google won't capture small niches, because it's irrational for them to deploy engineers to earn $10 when those same engineers can be deployed to earn $100 somewhere else.
Also: just because you have all the resources of Google doesn't mean you're going to stick the landing on every project you start. On niche products, it's not only possible but actually kind of likely that you can out-execute Google.
That doesn't make live gaming videos a great new startup idea. Just be careful of the logic that says "Google entered a space and so now it's dead".