Business model based on another’s shortcomings? January 22, 2008
Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , trackbackI saw the announcement when I logged into Twitter about their service going down for two hours tonight.
This isn’t something new as we all heard about their outage during the MacWorld conference as well as a general trend of their uptime edging more towards downtime. It got me thinking about business models that focus heavily on another company’s shortcomings. I guess that is really how startups get their start anyway because one’s failings create opportunities.
At MessageDance, we have a new service that sends our users’ messages to Twitter (by email or through MessageDance.com) and will batch them up for delivery if Twitter is down. This is great during periods when Twitter has these infrastructure issues, but what about when they get it together? If you’re a one-trick pony company, then that’s about it for you. Your best hope is for grabbing as many users as you can and then figure out how to serve them after the storm has passed (any good examples out there?). The good thing about us is that it is just a nice feature that came about because of another’s shortcoming, but it isn’t the meat of our offering — it’s still all about Just One Email.
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