Well written and thought out post, I hope you get to sit down with the right people at Google tomorrow Will.
Best of luck with Live Ninja, as an early beta user of hangouts and someone who had never seen Live Ninja before this AM I have to say i am truly impressed with what you guys have built at Live Ninja
"Experts" and "expertise" in "Find Experts. Sell Expertise" is too general. I would try to come up with more concrete examples though I realize it's not an easy task.
I really really wished he would have told me what his product does a lot sooner. I don't read LiveNinja's blog every day. In fact, I had never heard of them before today.
I got to "Google copied us, and they suck," and then I simply lost interest.
I have had bigger companies copy my stuff before, sometimes including the typos, so I can feel for his tough position, but this doesn't sit very well.
Google already had the tech infrastructure for Helpouts. They would have aquihired them for their tiny user base and/or their domain-specific knowledge.
While, the author of the article has learned a lot over the past year - I think it is a safe bet that the information was not worth a lot to google. First, they could easily discover the same information after a few quick iterations. Second, there is a lot of organization debt during an aquihire which would make the knowledge transfer very expensive.
Compare Evernote with Google Keep. The latter, which came out later, converted me to use the former. You have nothing to worry about. A big company sucks at copying ideas. An innovative big company gives incentives to defensive maneuvers like this, but never sees them through to an offensive maneuver unless there's billions at immediate risk. If anything, Google is doing you a favor by shining the spotlight on a mediocre solution. All you need now is the product to tap into that dissatisfied channel. They just validated the significance of your market for you. Good luck!
Google Keep is great for shopping lists and maybe a quick sticky note or two. Everything else, not so much. I'm shocked at how little it's developed in the seven months since release.
Google are pretty well established in a few big categories, but aside from Android, I can't remember the last time they were really successful in muscling in on some new territory.
I know it's slightly off topic, but your comment "... the new iteration of Google Maps is proof IMO that they're not a great at products." I'm curious as to what you don't like about the new Google Maps? Personally, I think that while it took a little bit to get used to, it's great and works way better than before. I'm just curious to hear your two cents on what you don't like about the new maps. Thanks!
It's half and half for me. On the one hand it look awesome and many thing became easier to do. Like finding a route.
On the other hand it feels a bit like an Apple product to me. The old maps was more intuitive, now it's as if they want me to do things exactly the way they planned it and every other way is wrong.
Here are some of my personal rants on the new interface.
I hate how it zooms on every single search. Before, it would only move the map when your search result wasn't visible on the current map. If I'm searching for something, 90% of the time it's in my area and I want to know where it is relative to everything else. Now I always have to zoom out to get context (and they keep moving zoom UI element around--it's gone from top-right, to top-left, to bottom-right).
I cannot figure out how to use street view anymore. Looking at it now, I can kind of access it next to photos of a venue, but many times the venue is on a street corner or down an unmapped alley so you don't get to choose where you're looking from. They no longer show you what is mapped and what isn't and you cannot change your view from a top-down map. Last week I was searching near two similar street names (foo ave and foo st, for example). The one I wanted wasn't mapped and it snapped me to the other street, but I didn't know this.
They added a loading screen to the main page. Before you'd see tiles as they'd load, now you see a grey screen and the whole map fades in. This is terrible if you have a spotty connection. It also takes you longer to orient yourself since you can't see any landmarks until the entire page completely loads. Thankfully there still is progressive loading when panning/zooming (which, I think, was one of Google Maps original killer features).
Web Client:
First of all, I hate how control are at 4 opposite corners of the screen. On any screen size it now takes longer to go from one control to another.
I used to be able to zoom down all the way to street view. Now I have to click on a spot and hope that the street view option comes on.
I used to be able to right click and search nearby. Now when I search in an area and want to see a list of results and I can't change the search area without going back and forth.
It's one thing to change the aesthetics and move features around. But to completely remove features is really annoying.
Mobile client:
My use case is when I'm in motion. I want to see where I'm at currently. It always shows where you last were before it fetches a GPS signal. Sometimes, it even shows me moving in the opposite direction at my old location before it finally updates and animates to my location. This leads to confusion while I'm driving or walking. The animation is really annoying because sometimes I'm super far from my previous location and I have to wait for the app to animate to my position and on top of that zoom down to a default zoom level which should never be assumed because different zoom levels have different contexts and this assumes a default.
When I do searches for anything, it automatically zooms to the top hit. I always have to zoom out or even stop it while it's mid-zoom. They've removed tons of features like layers, seeing things along the way during navigation (useful for gas stations along the way home), etc. For the mobile client, I can really go on forever.
There was nothing wrong w/ the old maps looks wise. Yes, the new maps "looks" nicer but it's actually frustrating to use and I'm sad to see a lot of features go.
Having Google enter your space must be one of the most crushing things that can happen to a small company. The feeling these guys felt when they saw the announcement must have been mortifying. Even if you have a superior product, like LiveNinja says they have, Google will outmarket you by so many orders of magnitude you just disappear into nothingness.
That's a terrible way to think. Drew Houston knew Microsoft and Google were already in the midst of building competitors when he applied Dropbox to YC.
I hope fellow entrepreneurs dont ever get discouraged when they see larger companies follow them on the same trail. It means they are on the right track more than anything else.
Dropbox didnt get discouraged and neither should any other startup.
Are there a lot of products where Google's forced out the competition? All I can think of are search, maps, and webmail (a long time ago) and web analytics (closely coupled to their core business).
The rest of the stuff I can think of is either competing but not dominant (phone OSes, browsers), or bought as a winner (doubleclick, youtube). They don't seem to have honed their Microsoft-ish emulate-and-destroy skills.
He's probably not bluffing that Google moving into your space is a good thing for your company.
Also google reimplementing somebody's working business is one of the most evil things I can think of in IT.
Google has pretty much unlimited resources and an army of bored overqualified engineers. They can literally take any successful online business, implement it themselves, and push it forward with their search engine.
Given the probably smallish market for helpouts for a giant like Google, I think we should see Helpouts more like a marketing thing for Hangouts than a full-fledged competitor in this space?
I'm actually curious about what sort of mistakes Google is obviously making here besides being a competitor to LiveNinja. Did I miss something or is this post just vague trash talking?
If he were to acknowledge the main differentiation he would lose a lot of Android users. Hangouts, will be integrated in all 4.4+ devices providing a huge direct market for Google. In just one service announcement, Google has successfully outsourced their support department.
There have been a number of similar startups and companies, so it's a stretch to assume that Google stumbled upon your company and decided to copy it. (Not to say they don't do exactly that -- but they target big proven markets, like Dropbox and Groupon and Facebook.)
It's easy to forget that at any given moment, lots of smart people are independently identifying a market opportunity.
The good news is that the revenue for Google will be so low it will likely be shelved when they put more wood behind fewer arrows. I suggest writing your "We're sorry to see Google Helpouts go, here's how to import your profile" post in advance.
The article never argues that the Google is copying his startup (except facetiously in the title). He rants that Google launched a product in the same space and appears to be making the same mistakes that he did on his first iteration.
"...I’m pretty underwhelmed." pretty much summarizes every single Google asset ever. Don't worry, Helpouts (who the F comes up with those names, Google), will be dumped in the dustbin before long as Google starts finding interest in the next thing that it only haphazardly cares about.
Man doesn't explain what Google is doing wrong.. I think OP just wants to let Google know that he is a competitor and considers himself ahead of the game.
Kudos and Best of luck. Sometimes the smaller nimble player are the key for a solution, which a decade back Google was, and now you may have that chance. Get it going, make it big and put a $X Billion price on the door.
...and yes don't go for knock out, make them sweat. Cheers!!!
Wish more companies cut to the chase and simply advertised themselves as e.g. "exactly like Google Helpouts, except Not Google"
The "not Google" tag in itself is enough to drive me to click, where previously I didn't even know what Helpouts was, and had been ignoring the links. "Gee, another free product I'd need a Google Account for, I immediately don't even care what it does"
This sounds like a good rallying cry, but as someone who is seeing both products for the first time, I would say that Google does a much better job of communicating their product. In fact, I would not have not know what SiteNinja did if not viewing the Google product first.
I have to be honest, one thing google is doing right is actually having the product on the first page. I would seriously consider changing your front end. It is crazy busy with self promotion when I'm already there to see whats going on. Hopefully I remember to check it out in the future but in the 10 seconds I looked at your page, I had no idea where to go to get started and browse the listings.
I stopped reading pretty quickly in and then scanned through it... It doesn't look like he gave any real takeaway and it came off as just a veiled insult to google to me.
> I really love competition, and as a competitor I only want to compete against the best of the best. It’s like Mike Tyson in his prime saying that he wants to box with you.
Wanting to box Mike Tyson in his prime is a death wish. Maybe not the best analogy...
If Mike Tyson says he wants to box with you, that's a compliment (either that or he just really doesn't like you). Actually agreeing to do it, that's where the death wish comes in.
>"Wanting to box Mike Tyson in his prime is a death wish. Maybe not the best analogy..."
Probably not.
Though, the thing that Iron Mike brings to mind in the context of startups for me isn't his impetuous style, impregnable defense or ferocious offense. It was the way so many of opponents we're seemingly defeated before the bell.
Tony Tucker gave strong evidence he wasn't invincible and Buster Douglas proved it. They did it by maintaining composure and confidence in both cases.
The lesson, I think, is to understand the challenge in front of you, attack it intelligently and be fearless in doing so.
Love it. Gutsy, and getting your story to be linked with Google, so it will be picked up. That way you'll get more traffic to your startup. And as a side benefit you can get Google to possibly make an investment bid in you.
I'm not going to lie, I didn't like this post as much as I wanted to.
The author says that Google is making the same mistakes that LiveNinja made over a year ago. And that LiveNinja has learned a lot and iterated since then. At this point, I'm ready to believe that LiveNinja is the more mature product. That if I have a need, I should probably go to LiveNinja. I'm ready to be sold... But then the author does nothing. He don't actually tell me WHY LiveNinja is better. Instead, he mentions Google Answers, Buzz, and Wave.
Why not drop the ad hominem, and sell to your potential customers instead?
That article is just a big bitch fest, or maybe it is just his toen I do not like. You could have summed what he says into 2 sentences. As you say, it would have been much more mature to have compared the 2 products, show why their product is better and done away with all the childish ranting.
Cut the guy some slack.. Imagine you just woke up to see Google is now your biggest competitor... I imagine this was written off the cuff and during a state of panic. Entrepreneurship is already a tremendous roller coaster of emotions and this I am sure was not helpful. The founder of LiveNinja doesn't seem immature to me. He built a great product and I am sure very passionate.
Sure, I feel for the guy and I'm sure they are very passionate people, I don't doubt that. But the problem with "off the cuff" on the internet is that lots of people read it and it's not in internet memory. They're running a business and sometimes you need to take the personal touch out of it a little.
What would have been better, from my perspective, would have been after reading the post saying "hey, these guys have a much better product that what Google has launched, it is much more mature and much more thought out. I think I'll give them a try and tell my friends to do the same". Turn a negative into a positive, that's all he can do at this point.
Agreed. All this article really gives me is a brand comparison of both products. I know what to expect from Google, and Helpouts is probably familiar in the brand vein of Hangouts. However after reading this article I'm left with a sour brand impression from Liveninja. I get that vibe of nerd machoism from the tone of the article and the product name, ninja pirates and robots oh my.
I'm glad that he didn't...in a hopeful sense anyway. I would have preferred this post to come after they truly did crush google in this space, as I think it is an inspiration to the small/new guys who intimidate and bully themselves from ever doing something because they just think that google and friends will swoop in and do it faster and better.
I have my reservations, but I hope that these guys create a better product and end up being bought out by google in the long run.
But he doesn't spell out the ways in which LiveNinja is better, like others here, I was waiting for the comparison? He's deliberately held off on specifics to use it as a selling point for acquisition.
"Buy us and I'll tell you what we learned"
"Hey, we're better than you. We've been here for awhile, we've already solved the mistakes you'll be making. Oh btw, we won Startup World. Why don't you just acquire us already?"
I have mixed feelings, right now I'm experiencing a similar story with a project I have, and at this point I'm frustrated because whatever feature or differentiator I add, my competition takes it, at this point I feel like I'm the one shaping my competitor.
I can only spend ~4 hours/week to this project and I'm the only person behind it, whereas my competitor has ~20 active contributors, so I'm starting to get dismotivated enough to continue with the project...
Considering that my competition is stealing whatever I do, and considering that I don't have the resources to compete with them, I don't see much options...
My project is closed, their project is open. No party is directly involved in any money-related activity and there are many legal and political reasons behind this situation.
There is much backstory to tell, but my intention is not to deviate from the main thread, but to share that I can relate with the frustration of not being able to stand against a competitor due to lack of resources.
In my case it was more viable to give up since it was a "for fun project" (and the fun stopped when I had to take care about defending my work, getting a lawyer, taking care about how to license it, etc.), but I'm pretty sure that if the project were an important part of my career or my living I would have looked for options to save it.
The target audience for posts like these is more often than not...(wait for it)...the person who wrote the post.
When a big company enters your space and becomes a competitor, the first reaction of many if not most founders is to worry. These types of posts are an effort on the part of founders to convince themselves that the larger competitor has an inferior offering and won't be able to compete effectively.
Incidentally, I think LiveNinja's biggest challenge is the same as Google's: its offering is way too broad. The fundamental purpose of these services is to aggregate "expertise" and market it to consumers on behalf of the providers of that "expertise."
To do that effectively, vertical focus is crucial. This is especially true if you're a startup, but it will also apply to Google unless Google leverages search and YouTube to promote relevant Helpouts providers.
Seconded. I used to work at Betterfly which is in the same space and our lack of focus on a vertical ultimately really cost us. To our VC's credit, they always pushed us to pick a vertical--even if it was something completely random. Building a general product for everyone is super hard and you risk satisfying no one. When I moved on from the job to my own start-up, the single biggest lesson I took was to pick a vertical!
To be honest, I would be most afraid of not having the resources to compete, but at this point I began thinking, why not contact a Google competitor?
I mean, if he can prove that Google is way behind his work, then he has an advantage that may provide more value to a company that is interested in competing with Google and has the resources to justify competing at a bigger scale.
The trader in me smells fear in this post, not confidence.
To (quickly) test my intuition I compared the language in this post with the last two [1,2] using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) statistic [3]. This statistic tends to decrease by 0.4 to 0.8 following trauma [4]. The original post was written with the sentence and vocabulary complexity of a 6th or 7th grader (6.9). The other two were more at the level of an 8th grader (8.4 and 8.8). Thus, we see a -1.7 change in the FKGL.
Why would he provide fodder to Google Helpouts product managers?
He is already 'selling' his product, by writing a blog, by making sure it showed up on HN and pointing out that his product is more mature and Google tried to 'get inspiration' from his product (by creating accounts on his website and probably browsing through features etc).
He has drawn enough attention so that potential users might now try it out for themselves and compare between his product and Google Helpouts.. He doesn't have to list out the features one-by-one that they have found through 2 years of being a live/running product that they believe are strong differentiators.
In any case, it wouldn't be the features that will lead to growth of such products. It would be the momentum they generate and mass they can gather that will feed itself and further increase adoption. Making it harder for any late comers to make any significant dent.
Also, he is probably leaving enough tantalizing info out of public, to possibly draw Google to the table for a possible acquihire. You can sense from the tone of his blog that he is neither being too harshly critical (that they copied his product) nor too solicitous of Google's products/services/prowess. Just setting the right amount of tone.
> Why would he provide fodder to Google Helpouts product managers?
Because the article has no actual content and sounds like self-congratulatory fluff. It doesn't convince me that LiveNinja is better than Google's offering. It convinces me that the author of LiveNinja cannot actually point to one concrete thing that they do better than Google.
Entirely seriously, their site has been top of HN for a few hours now. They don't care in the slightest whether the post make more sense, in fact probably better lay the HN counter-argument on a plate with a link-bait headline.
It's a thinly veiled marketing attempt and because we've voted up rather than flagged, it's worked. I'd have a big grin on my face in his position today...
They're never really going to make it big just by making it to the top of HN, are they? They seriously need to be looking at a bigger audience base than that... I presume the link has been making the rounds on reddit et al too?
I went back and re-read it because at the end I still had the question of "Why is LiveNinja better than Helpouts" or "What is Helpouts doing wrong". I'm not weighing in on either side I just would like to know what he doesn't like about Helpouts.
Because the real audience is not some guy on HN, but the small number of people at Google who could acquire his company and might meet with him while he's at Google tomorrow?
I'm sorry, but the post strikes me more as a rant-y whine from a company that isn't competition in a field that is alive and well..
How is Google's service a copy of your product?
Several live support sites have come and gone, way before you even started your private beta, and some are still around ( e.g. http://www.liveperson.com/experts being one that comes to mind).
There are a multitude sites that offer live instructions that thrive ( e.g. http://livemocha.com )
What makes LiveNinja so unique (except a very nice design)?
A service that enables domain experts to give video advice to paying users is not an idea you're going to be the only one who's ever thought about. So it's a bit iffy to claim that someone copied your start-up. Unless you're talking about specific methods of defining or solving problems in your execution of the concept, which doesn't seem to me to have been the case here. I could be wrong, naturally.
133 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadBest of luck with Live Ninja, as an early beta user of hangouts and someone who had never seen Live Ninja before this AM I have to say i am truly impressed with what you guys have built at Live Ninja
"Experts" and "expertise" in "Find Experts. Sell Expertise" is too general. I would try to come up with more concrete examples though I realize it's not an easy task.
Thanks for the feedback - really appreciate it!
There doesn't seem to be any insight into how google is 'doing it wrong' other than a kind of 'they don't have the experience like us'.
We are competitors now after all. :)
You are clearing shooting to be aquihired
There's a difference.
I got to "Google copied us, and they suck," and then I simply lost interest.
I have had bigger companies copy my stuff before, sometimes including the typos, so I can feel for his tough position, but this doesn't sit very well.
While, the author of the article has learned a lot over the past year - I think it is a safe bet that the information was not worth a lot to google. First, they could easily discover the same information after a few quick iterations. Second, there is a lot of organization debt during an aquihire which would make the knowledge transfer very expensive.
Google are pretty well established in a few big categories, but aside from Android, I can't remember the last time they were really successful in muscling in on some new territory.
Google is great at engineering, but the new iteration of Google Maps is proof IMO that they're not a great at products.
With that said, I'm sure y'all at Live Ninja will throw the knock out punch.
It's half and half for me. On the one hand it look awesome and many thing became easier to do. Like finding a route.
On the other hand it feels a bit like an Apple product to me. The old maps was more intuitive, now it's as if they want me to do things exactly the way they planned it and every other way is wrong.
I hate how it zooms on every single search. Before, it would only move the map when your search result wasn't visible on the current map. If I'm searching for something, 90% of the time it's in my area and I want to know where it is relative to everything else. Now I always have to zoom out to get context (and they keep moving zoom UI element around--it's gone from top-right, to top-left, to bottom-right).
I cannot figure out how to use street view anymore. Looking at it now, I can kind of access it next to photos of a venue, but many times the venue is on a street corner or down an unmapped alley so you don't get to choose where you're looking from. They no longer show you what is mapped and what isn't and you cannot change your view from a top-down map. Last week I was searching near two similar street names (foo ave and foo st, for example). The one I wanted wasn't mapped and it snapped me to the other street, but I didn't know this.
They added a loading screen to the main page. Before you'd see tiles as they'd load, now you see a grey screen and the whole map fades in. This is terrible if you have a spotty connection. It also takes you longer to orient yourself since you can't see any landmarks until the entire page completely loads. Thankfully there still is progressive loading when panning/zooming (which, I think, was one of Google Maps original killer features).
Web Client: First of all, I hate how control are at 4 opposite corners of the screen. On any screen size it now takes longer to go from one control to another. I used to be able to zoom down all the way to street view. Now I have to click on a spot and hope that the street view option comes on. I used to be able to right click and search nearby. Now when I search in an area and want to see a list of results and I can't change the search area without going back and forth. It's one thing to change the aesthetics and move features around. But to completely remove features is really annoying.
Mobile client: My use case is when I'm in motion. I want to see where I'm at currently. It always shows where you last were before it fetches a GPS signal. Sometimes, it even shows me moving in the opposite direction at my old location before it finally updates and animates to my location. This leads to confusion while I'm driving or walking. The animation is really annoying because sometimes I'm super far from my previous location and I have to wait for the app to animate to my position and on top of that zoom down to a default zoom level which should never be assumed because different zoom levels have different contexts and this assumes a default.
When I do searches for anything, it automatically zooms to the top hit. I always have to zoom out or even stop it while it's mid-zoom. They've removed tons of features like layers, seeing things along the way during navigation (useful for gas stations along the way home), etc. For the mobile client, I can really go on forever.
There was nothing wrong w/ the old maps looks wise. Yes, the new maps "looks" nicer but it's actually frustrating to use and I'm sad to see a lot of features go.
Having Google enter your space must be one of the most crushing things that can happen to a small company. The feeling these guys felt when they saw the announcement must have been mortifying. Even if you have a superior product, like LiveNinja says they have, Google will outmarket you by so many orders of magnitude you just disappear into nothingness.
I hope fellow entrepreneurs dont ever get discouraged when they see larger companies follow them on the same trail. It means they are on the right track more than anything else.
Dropbox didnt get discouraged and neither should any other startup.
In this case, LiveNinja was first, Google copied it, apparently building the exact same product.
So, I'd read the original post as "please buy us" as well.
The rest of the stuff I can think of is either competing but not dominant (phone OSes, browsers), or bought as a winner (doubleclick, youtube). They don't seem to have honed their Microsoft-ish emulate-and-destroy skills.
He's probably not bluffing that Google moving into your space is a good thing for your company.
Google has pretty much unlimited resources and an army of bored overqualified engineers. They can literally take any successful online business, implement it themselves, and push it forward with their search engine.
It's not illegal, I know, but it is unethical.
It's easy to forget that at any given moment, lots of smart people are independently identifying a market opportunity.
The good news is that the revenue for Google will be so low it will likely be shelved when they put more wood behind fewer arrows. I suggest writing your "We're sorry to see Google Helpouts go, here's how to import your profile" post in advance.
> I’m really happy a small team based out of Miami was able to inspire you in the way that we did
Kudos and Best of luck. Sometimes the smaller nimble player are the key for a solution, which a decade back Google was, and now you may have that chance. Get it going, make it big and put a $X Billion price on the door.
...and yes don't go for knock out, make them sweat. Cheers!!!
The "not Google" tag in itself is enough to drive me to click, where previously I didn't even know what Helpouts was, and had been ignoring the links. "Gee, another free product I'd need a Google Account for, I immediately don't even care what it does"
Google does this much, much better.
Why?
>This is more like a squeeze bunt back to the pitcher and you’re out at first base.
How so?
>What I’m seeing when I look at Helpouts is some of the exact same mistakes we made over a year ago, while our company was still in private beta.
For example?
>...you built Helpouts all wrong.
Go on...
>Will people buy some of these Helpouts? Yes. No doubt. But it’s not going to scale in the way you hoped. Not like this.
Like what?
> I really love competition, and as a competitor I only want to compete against the best of the best. It’s like Mike Tyson in his prime saying that he wants to box with you.
Wanting to box Mike Tyson in his prime is a death wish. Maybe not the best analogy...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-478QGV9pc
Probably not.
Though, the thing that Iron Mike brings to mind in the context of startups for me isn't his impetuous style, impregnable defense or ferocious offense. It was the way so many of opponents we're seemingly defeated before the bell.
Tony Tucker gave strong evidence he wasn't invincible and Buster Douglas proved it. They did it by maintaining composure and confidence in both cases.
The lesson, I think, is to understand the challenge in front of you, attack it intelligently and be fearless in doing so.
They announced partnerships with many celebrities, got PR on every major tech and fashion outlet.
In the end Fashiolista ended up dominating its space and google boutiques...
So stop your attempt at getting bought, get back to work and show these guys :)
The author says that Google is making the same mistakes that LiveNinja made over a year ago. And that LiveNinja has learned a lot and iterated since then. At this point, I'm ready to believe that LiveNinja is the more mature product. That if I have a need, I should probably go to LiveNinja. I'm ready to be sold... But then the author does nothing. He don't actually tell me WHY LiveNinja is better. Instead, he mentions Google Answers, Buzz, and Wave.
Why not drop the ad hominem, and sell to your potential customers instead?
What would have been better, from my perspective, would have been after reading the post saying "hey, these guys have a much better product that what Google has launched, it is much more mature and much more thought out. I think I'll give them a try and tell my friends to do the same". Turn a negative into a positive, that's all he can do at this point.
I have my reservations, but I hope that these guys create a better product and end up being bought out by google in the long run.
"Hey, we're better than you. We've been here for awhile, we've already solved the mistakes you'll be making. Oh btw, we won Startup World. Why don't you just acquire us already?"
I can only spend ~4 hours/week to this project and I'm the only person behind it, whereas my competitor has ~20 active contributors, so I'm starting to get dismotivated enough to continue with the project...
Considering that my competition is stealing whatever I do, and considering that I don't have the resources to compete with them, I don't see much options...
Obviously the only solution is to start putting horrible features that people will hate.
There is much backstory to tell, but my intention is not to deviate from the main thread, but to share that I can relate with the frustration of not being able to stand against a competitor due to lack of resources.
In my case it was more viable to give up since it was a "for fun project" (and the fun stopped when I had to take care about defending my work, getting a lawyer, taking care about how to license it, etc.), but I'm pretty sure that if the project were an important part of my career or my living I would have looked for options to save it.
When a big company enters your space and becomes a competitor, the first reaction of many if not most founders is to worry. These types of posts are an effort on the part of founders to convince themselves that the larger competitor has an inferior offering and won't be able to compete effectively.
Incidentally, I think LiveNinja's biggest challenge is the same as Google's: its offering is way too broad. The fundamental purpose of these services is to aggregate "expertise" and market it to consumers on behalf of the providers of that "expertise."
To do that effectively, vertical focus is crucial. This is especially true if you're a startup, but it will also apply to Google unless Google leverages search and YouTube to promote relevant Helpouts providers.
I mean, if he can prove that Google is way behind his work, then he has an advantage that may provide more value to a company that is interested in competing with Google and has the resources to justify competing at a bigger scale.
To (quickly) test my intuition I compared the language in this post with the last two [1,2] using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) statistic [3]. This statistic tends to decrease by 0.4 to 0.8 following trauma [4]. The original post was written with the sentence and vocabulary complexity of a 6th or 7th grader (6.9). The other two were more at the level of an 8th grader (8.4 and 8.8). Thus, we see a -1.7 change in the FKGL.
[1] http://willweinraub.com/post/44506341885/the-happiness-equat...
[2] http://willweinraub.com/post/53269730823/stop-saying-you-hav...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid#Flesch.E2.80.93K...
[4] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/227792923_Relationsh...
He is already 'selling' his product, by writing a blog, by making sure it showed up on HN and pointing out that his product is more mature and Google tried to 'get inspiration' from his product (by creating accounts on his website and probably browsing through features etc).
He has drawn enough attention so that potential users might now try it out for themselves and compare between his product and Google Helpouts.. He doesn't have to list out the features one-by-one that they have found through 2 years of being a live/running product that they believe are strong differentiators. In any case, it wouldn't be the features that will lead to growth of such products. It would be the momentum they generate and mass they can gather that will feed itself and further increase adoption. Making it harder for any late comers to make any significant dent.
Also, he is probably leaving enough tantalizing info out of public, to possibly draw Google to the table for a possible acquihire. You can sense from the tone of his blog that he is neither being too harshly critical (that they copied his product) nor too solicitous of Google's products/services/prowess. Just setting the right amount of tone.
Because the article has no actual content and sounds like self-congratulatory fluff. It doesn't convince me that LiveNinja is better than Google's offering. It convinces me that the author of LiveNinja cannot actually point to one concrete thing that they do better than Google.
It's a thinly veiled marketing attempt and because we've voted up rather than flagged, it's worked. I'd have a big grin on my face in his position today...
I went back and re-read it because at the end I still had the question of "Why is LiveNinja better than Helpouts" or "What is Helpouts doing wrong". I'm not weighing in on either side I just would like to know what he doesn't like about Helpouts.
How is Google's service a copy of your product?
Several live support sites have come and gone, way before you even started your private beta, and some are still around ( e.g. http://www.liveperson.com/experts being one that comes to mind).
There are a multitude sites that offer live instructions that thrive ( e.g. http://livemocha.com )
What makes LiveNinja so unique (except a very nice design)?
Edit: links clickable