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Comment by volida | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why so many people think of a "me-too" a bad thing. This way we would have only one automobile brand, only one clothing brand and the list goes on...

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1. Because nobody can start a car company without hard knowledge and expertise, whereas any idiot who can talk can con VCs into funding a me-too and blind them with hype. 2. Because the Net moves so fast that the me-toos are ready just as the idea is outpaced 3. Because the people who propose the 'me toos" emanate a vibe of conformity and foolishness.... so if the person is an idiot we say "me too" if the person is smart we say "oh that tech whiz."

Anyone can be a foolish bozo and try to sell a me-too with hype. But good VCs will be able to see this.

The me-toos that CAN succeed is the one that actually do it better -- they can implement an existing concept in a way that executes better or, in the case of a web service, engages users more effectively.

I just submitted an article from OnStartups.com that talks about this in a little more depth. Maybe this will spur some more good conversation:

See http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=754

photo.net was 1999, flickr 2004, zooomr 2006...my point is that the pie is so big the many folks can have their piece, because nobody can have it all. about the car industry comment...most of the folks that made a so called "me-too" car company, was in the beggining of that industry, that is 80-100 years ago. Yes, its hard to make a new brand but Pegani Zonda seems to have done it in 21st century so good that it can compete with Ferrari. With your thinking people shouldn't be programmers because there are too many of them. <br>

I will just aggree that if you can do it better then just do it.

Are you sure nobody can have the whole pie? Some domains have significant network effects, which work to prevent competitors from developing a useful service. E.g. eBay.

Ebay itself acquired StubHub. So I guess there are some mitigating factors to networks effects.

Ebay bought its Chinese clone for hundreds of millions of dollars, which afterwards collapsed because after moving the servers outside China the service's data were going through word filtering (e.g. during login) and there were failures...

Ebay bought its Chinese clone for hundreds of millions of dollars

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