{"id":320,"date":"2008-02-07T09:46:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-07T17:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/archive\/2008\/02\/slam-dunk-startups"},"modified":"2016-05-25T23:34:29","modified_gmt":"2016-05-26T06:34:29","slug":"slam-dunk-startups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/archive\/2008\/02\/slam-dunk-startups","title":{"rendered":"Slam Dunk Startups"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I often hear people say things like <strong>&#8220;if only I thought of YouTube a year before YouTube did, I&#8217;d be rich&#8221;<\/strong>, implying that given first-mover advantage, that person could create a company as great as YouTube.  A statement like this completely disregards just how difficult YouTube was to <em>build<\/em>, from having the balls to allow brazen copyright violation, to building a great user experience, to scaling out the ability to serve millions of video streams a day.  In other words, 99 out of 100 people who may have had the same idea at the same time would have failed to create anything remotely as successful as YouTube.<\/p>\n<p>Other startups fall into the same class.  Companies like Google and Amazon owe most of their success to great engineering, great execution, and great scaling.<\/p>\n<p>But which are the startups of the last ten years which really <em>do<\/em> owe most of their success to someone simply having a smart idea first and acting on it quickly?  Perhaps an easier way to ask this question is &#8220;if you could have one business idea from the last ten years as your own, which idea could you most assuredly turn into a success?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In trying to think of good examples, the best one that came to mind for me was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hotornot.com\" target=\"_blank\">HotOrNot.com<\/a>.  Super simple idea.  Developed by two people.  Very low expenses.  Millions of dollars in revenue per year.<\/p>\n<p>Any better examples out there?  What are the most slam dunk ideas of the last ten years?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I often hear people say things like &#8220;if only I thought of YouTube a year before YouTube did, I&#8217;d be rich&#8221;, implying that given first-mover advantage, that person could create a company as great as YouTube. A statement like this completely disregards just how difficult YouTube was to build, from having the balls to allow [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,282],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-original"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}