But those of us who live in Europe sometimes get absolutely infuriated by US-based startups who go for years ignoring potential non-US customers. I'm sure Fab.com would have eventually rolled out to Europe, but in the meantime I'm happy that someone else built a product that solves the same problem.
Sometimes this is a real regulatory problem, like anything to do with banking/payments/etc. But oftentimes it's just because businesses don't seem to like taking on the extra work/complexity of thinking internationally.
So while I don't like their pure copycat methods (down to page layouts), I think they're serving a valuable purpose in the marketplace.
Working often with american programmers, I can tell they often have a hard time including globalization in their code. On the other side, they are usually also quite capable folks, and once they get it they apply it consequently and efficiently. But possibly the culture is not there yet at the beginning.
Still I don't get why not expanding aggressively globally, as the code base exists and the cost of delivering in additional countries should be marginal for most. Too much VC money flowing in maybe?
It's not necessarily marginal. The EU has 2.5x the population of the US but 20x the languages, address/phone formats, cultural differences/expectations, etc.
When things are changing rapidly and getting new features, localizing and testing that many locales is a large time sink.
I guess it depends on the application, but since we're discussing web app copycats here -- where do you see this monumental time sink?
I'd say l10n and i18n are handled pretty well by pretty much all major web frameworks. Extra work yes, extra testing yes, but unless you've built your app in some insanely obscure way, I can't imagine how localizing it would be more costly than acquiring a copycat competitor, 6 months later?
I believe the obstacles must be more political and operational, not technical.
Sorry, but 1 & 2 are trivial and relatively cheap to deal with.
Legal issues can be a problem for certain services, but I see many services for which that is of absolutely no concern. Do you see any major legal issue for let's say, Quora or Stackoverflow?
Google only got into trouble after they became big enough to have a physical presence in various countries, plus they have taken up the ill-advised strategy of flipping the bird to non-US authorities.
1 can add significant time and complexity to your code trying to figure out what date format, for example, should be shown to various countries or regions. The easy solution would be to show one and provide options, but then which one do you show? Do you do geoip? Then what language are you going to put it in? Do you outsource translation, or hire a translator? How do you moderate user content on a multilingual site? Do you show local prices, and if so, how often is the conversion updated (if at all)?
There are serious logistical problems to tackle, not even counting getting it all running and bug-free for every use case in every language with ever data format possible. It's a huge setback, especially if you stand to gain nothing significant from being worldwide.
With regards to point 1, I like to remember the article on Local-sensitive Number Grouping: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/04/17/57748... - for me, this shows nicely how the rabbit hole, as usually, is deeper than you would think at first...
This comment shows a complete lack of understanding of what it takes to expand a service outside a given country (ie, the US). The final comment about VC money makes no sense at all.
Agreed. Copying page layouts is pretty bad, but, pre-Internet, nobody would have been upset if a company opened in San Diego that emulated another in New York.
Like you say, if they're not serving the market, then somebody else should.
I'm Italian and I live in Italy, and sometimes I see really interesting startups that (IMHO) could be successfully launched in Italy too. Sometimes I think I could be a copycat like these guys, sometimes I think I could just adapt their idea to my country market , other times I think about contacting the (tipically) US startup guys and ask them if I can help them in some way to launch here.
So, maybe it's time for a new (?) kind of job, the New Market Facilitator (or helper or.. feel free to find a better matching english term for it): a person that could be contacted to evaluate a specific market (i.e. a country), that can deal with localization, local laws etcetera.
What do you think?
PS if anyone is interested in launching their service in Italy, feel free to contact me at startup.in.italy@gmail.com (freshly made :D)
I think there is a lot to learn from companies that operate in multiple languages- I used to work for one myself (until they, too, got a little copy-happy). Internationalisation is a huge market, and almost all US startups ignore it entirely. We had our original sites running in French, German, Spanish, Portugese, Hungarian, Russian... you name it. We weren't number one in any country- we were usually number 2 or 3. But none of our competitors operated outside their home country, so we managed to be very successful by occupying a lesser spot in multiple countries. Don't get me wrong, there is a large overhead in doing this- but there's plenty of opportunity, too.
One of my first startup was a webmail service available in 17 languages a few months after launch. The focus on being able to internationalize it easily was a big deal in terms of getting traction, and once we had the infrastructure, rolling out new languages was trivial.
We even launched a Catalan version, and the cost of doing a translation was well worth the PR it generated for even (or maybe especially) a minor market like that.
Can you (or anyone, really) recommend some places to learn how about how best to do internationalization? It just seems like such an overwhelming topic, and any knowledge on how to best approach it would be most helpful, I think.
“There are pioneering entrepreneurs and execution entrepreneurs, and maybe we belong more to the execution entrepreneurs,” says Oliver, who speaks at a rapid clip, frequently punctuating thoughts with a rhetorical “ja?”
“I think the most admirable entrepreneurs are those with original ideas, ja? It’s a unique gift that you either have or you don’t. Just as we might have a very good gift of execution, others have a unique gift for the purest form of innovation.”
The constant mantra of HN is "ideas are useless, execution is everything". So why the hate against these guys?
Because I think these guys are copying both ideas and execution.
It's one thing to say "I want to make a site where people can rent out their spare rooms, I saw some other site do it", it's quite another to say "look at airbnb.com, copy that". When the exact execution is the same (even down to page layouts) you're not actually contributing anything yourself.
Well, I don't know that "Welcome to the real world" matters. No-one in HN is saying that they should be banned from doing it, or otherwise prevented. Just that we, as a community, don't value the people that do it.
Thom are you serious? of course Facebook solves the problem -- before it was hard to easily connect with others on such a broad spectrum. No, they were not first with social platform, "friending", IM, sharing photos, etc, but they did all this in the right time and place plus all the luck they had as a result they are the biggest social network which is a huge leverage on the market. My parents found tens of friends from military, schools, camps that took place 40 years ago, people that they lost connection with because there were no internet and no tools in place that time. So as much as I don't like Facebook and all the ongoing privacy issues, I would say: yes, they did solve a problem!
So by your definition the germans are solving a real problem then. The problem of localization. In other words, they are saving the world.
See the lines are rather blurry. Ultimately everything can be argued as solving a problem. But that is IMO a very unproductive way of looking at things.
Building the site is not the whole execution. There are other business processes they may be introducing and improving upon.
I like the "art" of building businesses and I'm nos sure I'm OK with what they do They are turning the art into an assembly line - all their ventures have high commonality - from information technology to business processes - and that should make them very efficient.
I have a few German friends, I understand them to be quite risk averse. However, what Samwers have accomplished in Germany is something far far more important and bigger than a clone industry - it is the spirit of taking risks, a willingness to aspire to be something other than traditional careers and a strong stance/philosophy on a type of entrepreneurship (clones) - stances such as these almost always lead to an ideological opposition and make way for others to engage in similar realms with differing philosophies. You can see that in Project A ventures, which is a reaction to Samwer's philosophy, and that reaction is good for Germany's start-up culture.
Erm... I don't think copying successful business is very risky. You can, of course, bork execution, but the key part - exploring the "needspace" and finding a viable business model - is already done. And even executing, when someone executed before, is rather easy.
You have no assurance that something that works in the USA will work also in Germany, Italy, EU or (even more difficult ) any african or asian country.
As said by others, there are language, cultural and legal differences.
EDIT (missed a piece): Execution is not only design and coding, it's also verifying the market, adapting the product to this market etc..
note: i'm not justifing them (at least not completely), just making some point.
True, they have to adapt the product, but, still, they start from the lessons the competitor already learned. Not all models adapt equally well to every market, but they appear to have a culture of "fail cheaply" sufficiently ingrained to lower risks. They are a very lean business.
And yet ironically, a lot of people will give up as soon as they see there's a competitor in the space where they were planning to start a business. "Oh, somebody's already doing that."
As a German I've never viewed it this way, but its true.
I'm working on creating a better Startup Community end Environment in my surrounding, not only because i'd like that to be here, but also because i'd like to show that there is a another, if not better, way to do this.
It's funny how Fab complains so much about having their business model cloned when Fab itself is just one in a long line of flash sales businesses with a landing page style that is so common you can get it as a SaaS.
+1. The only thing funnier to me is Facebook shutting down or legally going against anyone that scrap their data and get any traction, while the major reason why there are where they are is in part because of the co-owner's hackers past...
I think this says a lot about the English-language focus of a lot of startups. Failure to cater, through language options, to individual countries will result in a demand for services that do and the Samwer brothers are meeting this demand.
Is the price that companies such as GroupOn pay equivalent to the cost of localising their own offering? Maybe so and it may be a good deal.
Actually it's not just language, a lot of startups are US focussed which can be frustrating when you'd love to be their customer, don't mind using English etc.
Of course, with things like deals sites and so on, you might need to have localised sales organisations busy in each supported market.
But I wonder how many startups simply choose the English language/US market to minimise complexity and risk? (Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but it does open the door to copycats)
"There are pioneering entrepreneurs and execution entrepreneurs, and maybe we belong more to the execution entrepreneurs."
What doublespeak. Startups are 99% execution. All successful startup founders are "execution entrepreneurs." All that really distinguishes the Samwers is that they copy existing ideas, and there are already names for people who do that.
What they are doing is pretty frustrating but they appear to be doing it pretty well. Copying an existing business is not always trivial so I suppose they must be doing something right.
Now if they were churning out half-assed businesses just to capitalize on something that is currently trendy/popular then that's a different story. Just look at the Android market, it is full of copies of original indie games that came out on iOS first.
The term I was thinking of is "knock-off artists."
I don't like what they do. It's ok to take an existing idea and adapt it. E.g. to try to make a web-based version of a desktop app. But there is something contemptible about copying something so literally that you even copy the mistakes.
It does smell a bit funny, but in a way what they do is not just copy an app but rather create an international / European knock-off. They identified a weakness in the way American startups operate - concentrating on the American and/or English-speaking market for very long while neglecting the rest of the world, and they're taking advantage of that. Their business model would become obsolete if startups became better at addressing international markets.
I had completely missed that the Samwer brothers were in the web copying business. Last time I heard of them, they were busy selling teenagers ringtone subscriptions ("Jamba").
They were in the copycat business first, selling alando.de to ebay for millions, ~100 days after launch.
They have a history of making money by, if not illegal, at least morally questionable means, and got in trouble with the unions about treatment of employees...
I personally think it's distasteful to rip off a website design directly, but if they can launch a proven business model in Europe quicker than the American originators (or because the American company can't/won't go international), why not? Imitation is the greatest form of flattery and all that.
I'm not sure I understand why it is so bad. Yes, it is in bad taste, and yes it is wrong to copy layouts (probably illegal to copy layouts). But copying the business model itself? what is wrong with that, especially when the 'original' companies they are copying from, are not operating in Germany (and other countries the samwers are expanding to)?
Well, with the arrival of Project A ventures, you may not have to worry about getting them outlawed - now that an alternative exists you will probably have more people siding to the route of original ideas anyway.
As an American living in Berlin for the time being, I find it remarkable how often the Samwer brothers are cursed by startup founders. But, I agree: invent your own businesses :)
Ripping off the design is not cool. But otherwise, well it is like being the guy who opens the second restaurant, the first one might get annoyed but in a few years there will be thousands. Sounds like great execution too.
Interesting point you make about ripping off the design. I'm not a designer, just a humble developer .. why is it OK to rip of a product idea but not the design of a product?
I am not sure if this is defendable, but I would imagine it boils down to a difference that is often perceived between an idea (astract, possibly conceived by different people in similar ways) and it's realization.
People generally won't argue when good ideas are cloned between competing products, and praise the competition.
In the same way it's ok to write a theatre play in which the love between two people is contrasted by their families, but putting "wherefore art thou Romeo?" in the dialogs would seem bad.
Well, let's first scope "OK": Among artists it's a professional courtesy that the medium is public and the realization is private. It recurs in plenty of spaces -- for example, in comedy it's okay to joke about airports, but it's not okay to steal someone else's joke about airports. So the scope of "OK" here is "professional courtesy among artists."
Now we can answer why it is that way. Why do these comedians shun peers who steal jokes? Well the first reason is that it leads to crap. So, this sometimes happens with movies that are intended as comedies: ten different creative voices all try to push the jokes in a certain direction, and what you get is not extremely funny to 10% of the population -- which would be success -- but is only a little funny to 100% of the population -- which is a failure. So by taking someone else's joke and mixing it into a hodgepodge of other material, it stops being so funny as when it appears in the context that it's supposed to be in.
But I think a second reason is that we nurture ideas. It takes effort to turn an absurd concept into a good joke, and it takes effort to take an abstract idea like "coding with other people" and turn it into GitHub. When a comedian tells someone else's joke, there is a false pretense that they have spent all of this work to develop that joke for themselves -- and they haven't done any of it. When Eddie Izzard says, "This is my friend's Christopher Walken impersonation, and I'm nicking it, and he knows that," he's disavowing this aspect of the joke, and therefore it's more acceptable and can be used in his routine without too many eyebrows raised. The frustration is with people who steal almost every joke and achieve success with that -- not with people who steal one or another joke when they think it deserves to live on.
Copying ideas and execution just happens. Look at other industries - there's a Chipotle clone, frozen yogurt clones, etc. And many luxury sedans seem to be about 90% the same design, at least on the outside.
The reason the Samwer story is so weird is a) there's so much damn money in their game (Groupon, Facebook, etc.) and b) they're generally regarded to be ruthless, cut-throat, slave-drivers.
I know I'd feel differently about the phenomenon if they seemed less like idea-pirates and more like contributors to innovation.
Most of the discussion seems to be about whether or not it's "bad" that the Samwers are "copycats." I was more struck by the culture at Rocket, which sounds quite nasty judging by the article. (“team meetings are full of insults, non-performers openly bashed in meetings as well as via e-mail.”) At least one top Rocket employee is cited as leaving due to the "climate of aggression" (the bad, inwardly directed, self-destructive kind).
Don't we at HN usually say that it's the people that are most important? If culture is destiny, then the Samwers' copying of website layouts is the least of what's wrong here.
The communist regimes of 50 years ago were more than happy to protect our (American) ideas from foreigners. I suppose that in fighting so hard to undue this, we thought they would buy our products but not clone them.
But those of us who live in Europe sometimes get absolutely infuriated by US-based startups who go for years ignoring potential non-US customers. I'm sure Fab.com would have eventually rolled out to Europe, but in the meantime I'm happy that someone else built a product that solves the same problem.
Sometimes this is a real regulatory problem, like anything to do with banking/payments/etc. But oftentimes it's just because businesses don't seem to like taking on the extra work/complexity of thinking internationally.
So while I don't like their pure copycat methods (down to page layouts), I think they're serving a valuable purpose in the marketplace.