| That's a symptom that startups possibly became a new fashion. Now the following is a bit offtopic, but the thoughts are what I have in mind for quite a time. Look how many startups are there around whose only purpose is to connect or extract information from other startups whose again are build on the top some previous startups. Where is a stop for this? Where's the creativity? Where's the thinking of making things that people really need? This looks like a rant but please think of it analytically: 1. People start to use product A because it fills some temporary niche. 2. The conditions of the niche vanish, but the product is still used, the user base grows because of inertia, marketing, whatever. 3. As the initial conditions dissolved the product A isn't exactly what people need at the moment, so there emerge products B & C built on the top of A with even more fragile conditions: only to support momentary lack of desired features in A. Any similarity with existing startup scene? Well, what if all these products were build based on some more unconditional needs of the users in the first place? |
Startup owners are people that need things too - often really good customers to work with as they understand the time involved in building a product and will pay for services that save them time/money.
If anything, startups selling to startups is fantastic news as:
1. It's creating an ecosystem of small, independently owned businesses - a vibrant self-contained economy.
2. Good marketing is selecting a niche that is small enough to compete in but large enough to build a profitable business. It validates that startups are a successful enough business model that there's enough people in that community to constitute a profitable niche market.
3. It doesn't matter if the need is not permanent - all customer needs are transient given a long enough timeframe. If I have a problem I'll pay to solve then I'm not thinking about whether I'll have the same problem in 10 years, just that I want it solved right now.