Produce a product that is leaps and bounds beyond Pinterest. If you want to beat Pinterest, here's what you need to do, in no particular order: Excite? Lycos? AltaVista? Yahoo (Inktomi etc)? Who cares, it was mostly about who annoyed you the least, because the search quality largely sucked all around. Before that, they were all competing with barely better solutions and features. That's why the search engine wars were mostly a shit race of mild to severe mediocrity, until Google smashed them all with a 10x solution. If they're only slightly mediocre, you'll need a product 10x superior. To the extent your competitor is mediocre, you may only need a product several times better than theirs. It's dramatically more difficult to beat the existing competitor, even when they're mediocre, than it is to claim the initial territory (and doing just that, is extremely difficult). It's the same mistake people on HN have always made in claiming Uber can be smoked by a weekend MVP, and that they'll just face perpetual endless competition because it's so easy to do what they do.

People thought you could just copy the layout (as though that was the special thing), throw together the base features, and you might be the next Pinterest.Ĭopying & beating competitors doesn't actually work like most people seem to think it works. For a short while copying their layout was all the rage.

A vast array of companies tried to copy Pinterest, after their usage began to soar.

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