[7Figures2Commas]

The target audience for posts like these is more often than not...(wait for it)...the person who wrote the post.

When a big company enters your space and becomes a competitor, the first reaction of many if not most founders is to worry. These types of posts are an effort on the part of founders to convince themselves that the larger competitor has an inferior offering and won't be able to compete effectively.

Incidentally, I think LiveNinja's biggest challenge is the same as Google's: its offering is way too broad. The fundamental purpose of these services is to aggregate "expertise" and market it to consumers on behalf of the providers of that "expertise."

To do that effectively, vertical focus is crucial. This is especially true if you're a startup, but it will also apply to Google unless Google leverages search and YouTube to promote relevant Helpouts providers.

[JumpCrisscross]

The trader in me smells fear in this post, not confidence.

To (quickly) test my intuition I compared the language in this post with the last two [1,2] using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) statistic [3]. This statistic tends to decrease by 0.4 to 0.8 following trauma [4]. The original post was written with the sentence and vocabulary complexity of a 6th or 7th grader (6.9). The other two were more at the level of an 8th grader (8.4 and 8.8). Thus, we see a -1.7 change in the FKGL.

[1] http://willweinraub.com/post/44506341885/the-happiness-equat...

[2] http://willweinraub.com/post/53269730823/stop-saying-you-hav...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid#Flesch.E2.80.93K...

[4] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/227792923_Relationsh...

[jessaustin]

Are three data points enough when the topics are different? This is fine as a check on intuition, but maybe that's as far as it goes?

[JumpCrisscross]

That's certainly as far as it goes. This is more an intellectual toy.

[zaidf]

Seconded. I used to work at Betterfly which is in the same space and our lack of focus on a vertical ultimately really cost us. To our VC's credit, they always pushed us to pick a vertical--even if it was something completely random. Building a general product for everyone is super hard and you risk satisfying no one. When I moved on from the job to my own start-up, the single biggest lesson I took was to pick a vertical!

[Aldo_MX]

To be honest, I would be most afraid of not having the resources to compete, but at this point I began thinking, why not contact a Google competitor?

I mean, if he can prove that Google is way behind his work, then he has an advantage that may provide more value to a company that is interested in competing with Google and has the resources to justify competing at a bigger scale.

[tzury]

Man,your nick name made me laugh. It is a great one.