Some days ago, I watched the video of Kevin Rose (Foundation) interviewing Dennis Crowley from Foursquare.
Frankly speaking, I like the interview although there are some questions have been discussed in other media. However, the interview is inspiring enough. Some parts of it make me think about how to develop startup and the lesson faced on startup development process of both users and the service.
Foursquare, off course, has became the big location-based service–may be it’s the most popular one. Now, Foursquare has more than 1,5 billion users. I am not going to talk about the Foursquare detail, but more about Dennis comments as Foursquare co-founder. I think there is one interesting thing in the interview. It is about competition.
Competition is needed to make us more competitive or to educate market. However, when the competition is in higher level, the startups tend to lose their focus on their own service. They wrongly keep their focus on their competitor’s service.
Foursquare is in a tight competition, not only other startups compete in this segment but also giant competitors like Google or Facebook. What lesson can we get from the interview? At least there is one interesting thing I noted. It is to focus on what the company/startup do. Do not easily be distracted by your competitors.
For me, the interview is not only shows the Foursquare focus on running the company but more or less also shows how the company develop services for users.
As written previously by Razi on this guest post article, competition is important to build competitive atmosphere for company’s improvement. Competition can bring us to the ultimate ability and challenge us to give the best. However, if the company/startup keep on feeling “paranoia” with the competition, it will be the obstacle of their improvement and innovation. It might because of they keep more attention to their competitors than to their product/services.
Decide your plan in short, medium, and long period. Keep focus on the plan and don’t be distracted easily.
The plan, for some reasons, may change. Research on competition level and competitor should be done but in the right portion so that it doesn’t obstruct the startup development. As Dennis Crowley said, by knowing what do you want and focus on it, the company will be able to make many original products/services.
Talking about focus, I ever wrote about it based on Derek Sivers’ presentation at Echelon. You can read the article here. You may also watch the Kevin Rose’s interview here.