[kurtvarner]

You can't really blame them for taking the path they chose. Check-ins were what the market wanted at that time. Gowalla was guaranteed to be building for a market that existed. Yes, they could have said, "Screw check-ins, let's focus on photos", but that would have been a much bigger risk than going to war with an equally early staged startup.

Imagine if they would have drastically pivoted away from check-ins and failed. I'm sure Gowalla would be contemplating what could have been if they stayed true to check-ins and went to war with Foursquare.

I think it's too easy to say in retrospect that they should have "played by their own rules." Even though they were playing by the check-in rules, at least they were playing in a real game.

[iamwil]

Actually, you can, which was the point of his essay: focus on validating your vision, rather than being reactive to someone else's actions.

They were too focused on being reactive to a competitor, rather than really understanding their users. Because if you just copy whatever your competitor is doing, you're getting the understanding of your users second-hand, and you might end up copying things that aren't important--you might end up cargo culting.

He's not saying, "Oh, if we had only just done photo sharing, we would have knocked it out of the park!" He's saying that while checkins was a way to validate that users want to play a game that lets them see the world through their friends' eyes, they should have been open to other solutions to validate against that original thesis (like photo sharing), instead of being caught up in being competitive overriding the validation and learning about their users.

[shawnc]

The harder part is really looking at your users, how they use the product, what they want - but not what they say they want. With my product, we have people requesting features of the 'big dog' - only because that's what they've seen. We're not about to blindly implement what a competitor does just because they did it - it's assuming they did the research into that feature, and we don't have to.

Anyway, essentially - it's really hard to not copy a competitor when that's all your users are vocally asking for is to do just that.

[espadagroup]

Agreed, it's much more easy for Burbn, in 4th, 5th, 6th? place to say, hey let's try and pivot a bit rather than fight for first in this arena.

[wallflower]

Burbn pivoted and they knew what they were going after - it was not by accident - that they built an app that was gorgeous to use and make part of your life - they were focused.

"not the code, the experience"

https://speakerdeck.com/mikeyk/secrets-to-lightning-fast-mob...

[aufreak3]

I sort of interpreted this to mean that though neither of them had evidence about whether check-ins translated to revenue over time, Foursquare chose to project it as though it did, thereby creating the "game" that Gowalla joined.