"Competition is not a key source of concern to your small business" might be a better title, and I totally endorse it. BCC was cloned at least five times, AR at least once. (I don't mean "Someone entered the market" I mean "Someone literally had an oDesk project whose description was 'Create a clone of bingocardcreator.com.'")
You could barely it happened from the inside perspective, since the effect of competition was dominated by e.g. the business cycle, the whims of the Google gods, and my health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses.
I agree. I was going to get into this in the next post, but actually it seems that the pie has just gotten bigger along with these competitors (http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22japanese%20candy%2...), and it doesn't seem to be impacting the subscriber numbers.
To the extent that BCC was reliant on SEO and paid conversions... let's say you'd told someone the idea 6 months before you had availability to actually execute. Do you think the competitor could've established a beachhead?
For example, they'd have 6 months' lead on SEO, and on the paid acquisition channels they'd have either (a) CPC and LTV data that you'd still be guessing on; and (b) the ability to keep your bids arbitrarily high while you're still spinning up.
In other words: I think your sentiment is valid if you're both executing right now... but there's certainly some first-mover advantage.
So the scenario is that on January 1st 2006 someone comes out of a time machine to a young programmer and says "Hello world plus a random number generator is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Believe it! Start your SEO engines now!" And that programmer actually starts competently executing on that, because time lords are known to be trusty, benevolent, and curiously forgetful of all the many, many more lucrative messages that could be sent given that opportunity?
Then yes, that would have been problematic, I guess?
The more meaningful question to me seems "Does BCC's modest success necessarily mean that the operators of pre-BCC competitors were worse off?" In the large, I'm thinking "Nope." DLTK Cards (no reason any of you would have heard of them, but its a mom-and-pop operation which does a variety of school printables, including bingo cards) is still up there and probably still worth several tens of thousands of dollars in AdSense revenue a year. (Might even be six figures.)
I think it would be unlikely. I remember the first time I heard about BCC. I could not believe anyone was making money from an idea like that. Bingo cards for teachers. Well, first of all teachers don't typically have a lot of spare money. They aren't generally thought of as spendthrifts. Many of them are already spending their own money on classroom supplies, and I'm supposed to get them to spend more? My thought would be that the only way to make money selling to educators is to sell to school districts. That sounds a lot like enterprise sales, only probably even more political. Doesn't seem like a very lucrative idea.
So I don't think the idea would have appealed to very many people to begin with. Even fewer would have had the motivation to actually create the product and do the work to market it, and go through the effort of A/B testing idea after idea to figure out the best way to sell it. And even if they had, the world is a big place. No business has a lock on 100% of its market.
The idea is something, but it's hardly the whole enchilada.
People tried to clone Bingo Card Creator because you meticulously documented it being capable of bringing in small profits, and because there are some particularly lazy and stupid people out there -- the type who would post a want ad to "Create a clone of bingocardcreator.com." They read your popular blog, and in their stupidity thought they could use it as a recipe to make $X/year. I agree that they represent some form of competition, but that it is the weakest kind imaginable. Like you said, BCC succeeded on the back of "health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses." Without those things it scarcely could've turned any profit, let alone year after year, which is what makes your story so compelling. But I'm not sure it's a useful lesson about the supposed small threat of competition.
I have a smallish site that brings in between 5k and 10k in revenue each month. I have not documented anything about it anywhere. AFAIK we were first of the kind. There are new direct clones popping up all the time, I know of at least four now, and one in particular has to be outspending our ad budget by at least 3x.
People will "steal" your idea as soon as they believe that it will be profitable to do so, even if you don't write blog posts about it. You have to realize that it's not theft to compete, it's just competition. If you started a chicken restaurant, some guy who opened the first chicken restaurant wouldn't have any claim to shut you down. Competition is part of business, and there's no doubt it's made our offering much better and provided motivation that is hard to drum up without an externality. Competition is good, even if it's often unpleasant.
Some of that is a structural difference between sites which are built on paid traffic and sites that use SEO / brand.
Paid traffic is live by the sword, die by the sword; you can spin up a large audience fairly quickly using your checkbook but the next guy (with a large checkbook) can go outbid you. Boom, traffic drops. Blogging about paid traffic or how to improve conversion rates is suicidal.
The funny thing about SEO-based traffic models is Google is often very conservative about handing over the top spots if you're established in the niche. Established incumbents get the benefit of the doubt (from an algorithm perspective) in many major searches; I've seen old sites with very weak SEO and outdated offerings stand off new entrants (who execute better on the product & SEO fronts) for YEARS despite no content changes or link building.
Given that blogging usually helps your site rankings by a) feeding Google fresh content and b) earning a few backlinks and the most interesting story about a boring site is often how you promote it.... the extra kick from blogging may be the edge you need to stay on top in an SEO-driven category.
(obviously, if your initial SEO success was from buying 500 links from a black hat private blog network, you may want to keep your mouth shut....)
Theft is a genuine option that some choose to take. However, it can also be attributable to a cross-roads of ideas that emerge at the same time. Often, A product (or products) enable another product. Other times, ideas are rediscovered (eg. Luck, influence through a TV show).
As you said though, the competition is good for us all. If someone is asleep at the wheel, someone else will take over.
Yes, although small business might be an operative word. I'm thinking of Germany's Samwer brothers who have had great success in cloning successful US startups:
"You could barely it happened from the inside perspective, since the effect of competition was dominated by e.g. the business cycle, the whims of the Google gods, and my health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses."
If a larger company had a larger budget and larger team than yours, BCC would have been crushed. However, there is little money in the business (If I recall, it was making ~#2500/month before you sold it) and it's most likely not worth the effort for so little return for a larger company. In most parts of the world $2500 is barely enough for one person to survive.
"Competition is not a key source of concern to your small business"
If your business is in an extremely small market, I agree. However, as soon as it seems like you are making money, competitors will come sniffing around and if they have a better plan than you, can put you out of business. I've seen it many times at small companies. They ignore the competition and suddenly find themselves going bankrupt because the majority of their customers left.
I've actually had a jlist subscription, one of the other options he links, for much longer than Candy Japan has existed. Although I do reading material, not sure when they started doing snacks. If it was before Candy Japan as well, then they wouldn't have had much different impact on him that wasn't already there at the start.
> I thought it was pretty unlikely that anyone would also bother sending specifically Japanese candy.
Living in Japan, I often hearing foreigners coming up with the great business idea of selling Japanese products back home. Candy is pretty common as an idea.
These are only made by one specific place in Tokyo from what I know. They are also made fresh, and expire quickly. When you get them abroad you often have just 2-3 days to eat them.
There are several independent importers of small quanties the rest of Asia and elsewhere, and the prices go quite high, especially if they manage to get them quickly after they've made.
The same for me living in Taiwan - most common idea is selling tea to back home (wherever that might be, but not in Asia:). One day I'll execute on that! :)
Why didn't you patent it? I often think when I see the tag no one will steal your idea, only applies if you're idea isn't worth stealing - 'I'm gonna sell some stuff' isn't really an idea, it's just business, and so how you do your business matters - i.e. execution.
However if you come up with a truly new idea - a better compression algorithm for example - then the idea matters and execution matter as well. It's just truly new ideas are rare, and so the 'execution matters' mantra continues, because most new businesses aren't new ideas just different packaging.
Lots of people will steal your idea if it is good, but few will be able to execute on it correctly. There seems to be something about the people that copy other people's ideas that stops them from fully grokking what is involved - maybe it is those that are too lazy to come up with their own idea are also too lazy to correctly implement the concept.
My competitors actually seem to be executing very well, possibly better. For example http://www.japancrate.com have organized things very well, managing to import the boxes to US in a shipping container and then forwarding from there to local customers. That is obviously the right way to do it if you want to target mostly US, but I just lacked the expertise to pull it off.
I think (as I alluded to in another reply) that it's wrong to think that the only two outcomes are that you either lock in 100% of your market or you fail.
No business has 100% of its market. There are many profitable business that do not do everything as well as their competitors. They may be smaller, less efficient, less sophisticated---but they still attract enough customers to be a going concern. If I'm a customer, once I've made a purchase from you, you're a known quantity. Any competitor will seem like a risk. Evaluating whether it's worth changing takes effort, and unless I'm unhappy I probably won't do it.
Look at domain name registrars. There are hundreds. They all do pretty much the same thing. Some of them have really nice management tools, and some have really terrible ones. But even the terrible ones have repeat customers.
But this kind of is the point - ideas don't matter, execution does. If you suck at execution, you'll not be able to compete despite "your good idea". If you execute well, you'll get results but quite likely throw away the initial idea that seemed good at the time.
No matter how unique your concept is, the success or failure will anyway be determined by how well you compete with others doing the same thing, and this will have to be on the basis of execution.
If you execute something that everyone wants, there will be competition very soon - and then the execution will matter (as it should), not the initial idea.
This is why I mentioned few, not none :) There are people out there able to turn a good idea into a great idea.
Having said this importing containers is hardly cost free and requires good infrustucture in both countries to handle the process. It also ties up a lot of capital, but if you can achieve scale then it will allow you to deliver at a lower cost. Not so good for a hobby project though.
I just read Japan Crate's about page [1] and I wonder if their opening paragraph, and apparently their inspiration, was their initial experience with you.
'One day, I had a craving for some Meiji Apollo Chocolates (one of the most popular chocolates in Japan), so I scoured the Internet looking for some. The only service I found was both expensive and slow as they ship from Japan. Nonetheless, I placed an order for about 10 candies to be shipped to me for around $40. 3 weeks later, I opened the package to find melted chocolate and broken hard candies because it was in transit for so long. I thought, there had to be a better way, thus Japan Crate was born.'
Their execution is quite impressive IMO and you could definitely take their example as inspiration yourself for iterative improvements: website, better packaging, bulk shipping, etc. Also, you could take a look at [2] and try to optimise for locations in that list - marketing, shipping, language, etc.
On another note, it's quite amusing, but fitting, that you both use Japanese style cartoons to explain the process to your audience!\
Good luck!
P.S I met Japan Crate's CEO at Collision Conf in May in Las Vegas - he's a cool guy and seriously passionate about getting Japanese candy to the world!
There are actually companies that will let you ship a big box of stuff to them and they'll break it up and ship it out to your customers. I used to work for one and we got a fair amount of business from people who did similar things to candy japan because it's often much cheaper (and faster!) to ship one huge box via air freight from one country to another and pay for a lot of local postage (and handling fees) than it is to ship everything direct internationally.
I think this has to do with the "someone has to touch it" premium that individual boxes have. In other words UPS ground in the US is $5 minimum (and that's with a big commercial discount) no matter how close the destination is and how light the box is. But 50lbs isn't $250, it might only be $35 or $70 depending on the distance.
I define fantastic ideas as ideas that I would have no qualms committing myself to for years on end.
I've only ever had a few of these ideas, and it took months to develop them to the point where I fully believed.
Upon sharing with people I trust, the reactions I received might have been approximated as anything from indifference to them secretly thinking "this guy is totally nuts." This in turn wavered my own belief.
Later, two of those very same ideas ended up successful YC companies.
The moral of the story is: if you need to seek external validation to confirm your own idea is fundamentally good or not, you probably have no business executing on it in the first place.
I know that flies contrary to the oft-repeated dogma of seeking validation at every step (market or otherwise), but having to do this in the first place - at least on a fundamental level - reflects negatively on one's sense of product. It also underscores a lack of vision, and I dare say vision is one part unwavering belief.
Generally speaking, unless you're having a casual chat with Sam Altman and Paul Graham, you probably want to trust your own laboriously-thought-out conclusions much more than you would someone else's off-hand opinion.
It boils down to a difficult psychological balancing act. On one hand, you need to drink your own Kool-Aid to a point where others view you as crazy. On the other, you need to be mindful of traps such as bias and fear creeping into your thought process, rendering you truly delusional.
>IMO ideas need space and air to bloom, grow and flourish and you can't do that under lock and key.
I would argue they can, provided they are continually evaluated and evolved with rigorous thought. That said, giving an idea space to breathe is certainly a positive thing and should be sought when appropriate.
I started spinning the idea for an asian snack box thereafter. I found you in 2011 and gave up on it.
By 2012 it became the default business model for online wantrepreneurs.
Then Cratejoy spun up in 2013 and went gangbusters in 2014.
Now in 2015 it's the late comers to the trend with most of the profitable niches already covered.
I imagine by 2016 with all the low hanging fruits taken you're gonna need to be a established player to play the game considering the logistics costs and distributing something of substance.
Then we'll be on to something else to copy.
Biggest lesson I took out of watching the mail order box business is more or less it's a marketing game. It's all pretty much the same but reaching the potential audience is the hardest part.
This isn't competition like McDonalds vs Burger King where you can just drive a block down to get a burger, it's competition to being first to introduce the idea of hamburgers.
Cratejoy is basically a shopify clone so they got the software side covered.
The hardest part is still shipping.
When I looked into this the shipping was the killer, it eats up all possible margins until you get to scale. I learned about how FedEx and UPS works and how they handle last mile deliveries with the USPS and so on so forth.
Shyp is basically Postmate arbitraging on a national shipping account.
Amazon FBA is basically just Amazon arbitraging on Amazon.
That's the opportunity right there. Being somewhere in between Shyp and Amazon FBA. They call it 3PL, third party logistics provider.
You see that problem getting written about quite often. Everyone thinks they can solve it themselves but there's not quite a dedicated modern solutions provider.
But after working for a physical products company operating on a national level the only thing I've learned is that automating sending thousands of packages anywhere consistently is hard as all heck.
Also, I'll tell you the trick why Birchbox worked and became hundreds of millions of dollars and why these other box startups aren't in the same game.
Birchbox found the best opportunity to capitalize on. They charge subscribers to receive a box of makeup samples. In other words they've convinced people to pay money for ads.
The COGS are basically free and on top of that they leverage and poll their subscriber base for data that gets sold right back to the manufacturers.
Everyone else is just trying to replicate Sears Roebuck but unable to convincingly explain their value proposition.
There's of course the counter-example of Steve Blank where his startup E.piphany's entire slide deck was stolen verbatim.. they failed though. Does that make them nobodies?
You're adorable candyjapan. I want to bounce you on my knee. When you eventually run a biz that doesn't just generate millions in revenue but is massively profitable, give me a shout and let me know if you still feel this way.
Imagine you have a biz that prints money. You literally have dump trucks that roll up to your gate every morning and unload, and amazingly you get to keep about half of it.
It's rare to create a business like that and if word gets out you'll have competitors swarming all over you driving down your margins until you're blowing every last cent trying to out market them and all that profitability will go away.
So you learn to STFU. Because people will steal your idea.
In the Valley among startups almost no-one is profitable and so it's all about sharing the love and lots of hugs because no one has anything to defend.
I agree entirely with that, and find myself confused why you tell me that.
Obviously you think my post is a personal attack, yet i do not understand why.
Unless you care to hear them, i'll spare you the details, but i assure you i only intended to pointed something out that the person dearly needs to hear, in the hopes that it might lead them to introspection; not to attack them.
Two ways businesses print money: either be unique and capitalize on tiny amounts of large margins or be popular to capitalize on lots of tiny margins.
If it's popular and is profitable people will copy it. It's not that hard to reverse engineer products, most people just don't bother or try. Give me any CPG brand on the supermarket shelf right now and I can show you the supply chain and equipment needed to manufacture and deliver it.
Everything new gets commoditized eventually, especially considering it's all made in China anyways, and trickles through the global markets at various pacing.
That varying speed is the only competitive advantage one has. Your only job is to stay ahead of the game then when the game is boring sell that information to others to replicate. AKA franchising.
Then you keep spinning and spinning until 30 years later you can stand to wait around while others jump into a new market, burn out, and just take whatever you want out of that situation to come up with a new product and utilize your large economies of scale to immediately sell it in your extended network of retail stores that's making more per square foot than Tiffany's.
But do agree with the second part. Silicon Valley is just a giant R&D college campus built off other people's money experimenting on each other's child like sensibilities.
CandyJapan has been a great source of inspiration for launching a business with a similar business model: Tomotcha (https://tomotcha.com), a Japanese green tea subscription service.
Bemmu gave me a lot of advice at the last HN Kansai meetup to find more customers... thank you again Bemmu :)
At first I hesitated to do it the other way around: to import French wine in Japan and sell it as a subscription, but from the outside it seems harder. The rules for importing goods (especially alcohol) are quite a bit harder than the rules for exporting...
Thinking of offering more products/different kind of plans.
We are also still trying to figure out exactly the right price-point, so tweaking a bit the price/amount of tea. I have an Ask HN to do about that by the way...
Nice idea, we just might sign up! Have you considered launching Japanese pages? Most Japanese tea drinkers are Japanese, and it's surprisingly hard to get decent Japanese tea at decent prices overseas.
It's true that our service, as is, is not geared towards Japanese expatriates. There may be a large market there...
Do not hesitate to ask us anything about Tomotcha if you need more information about the service! Note that when you signup you can drop us an email to tell us that it's just for trial: you will be charged exactly once, and receive exactly one shipment. We should make a dedicated button to automate this process...
From the moment the business had this idea I forwarded them your blog and website, don't think they really appreciated the amount of knowledge present there.
As an immigrant in Japan you're an inspiration for launching my own business (one day).
If your startup is based on execution and/or customer relationship sure this is true. However some startups are IP based in which case this is not true, now admittedly there is a low % of IP based startups on HN.
Some startups can execute better than you and can be better funded. Remember Hojoki anyone, nope - Slack moved fast got the momentum, scaled and wham! Hojoki used to be better than Slack btw. However if you operate in the public arena most people will know or guess your plan as soon as you spin up your MVP anyway :)
Right now down to the elephant in the room. Apple regularly release products/features that look remarkably like 3rd party apps, but not enough to be sued. So yep, idea stolen, implemented and market cornered by a virtual monopoly.
The truth is a complicated thing and the word Nobody is just factually inaccurate.
I'd go with:
'You're more like to fail executing than have your idea stolen.'
It's a directly drawn from the premise that each startup is likely to fail. Stealing an idea doesn't make a company more likely to execute well and having an idea doesn't make a company less likely to.
Execution can make a difference on how likely you are to fail. There are so many examples out there where one execution won over even if the original idea was the same.
You're right it isn't. But also he's right, that the odds are against all startups - so a competitor also has the odds against them too. In an unproven market this is so much more true!
In regards to comments about IP :- compression and encryption are two obvious IP led areas. But also those working in the cutting 'technical' edge - such as high speed trading may well have solid IP.
The thing is a lot of SV based startups (a lot, not all!) are driven to solve customer/logistic problems not technical problems so they are less likely to have IP - unless (grrrr...) you count business practises as IP.
However startups out of a University incubator are more likely to be solving technical challenges and therefore have richer IP. As seen by the comments :-)
The light is shone so strongly on public facing SV startups it's easy for us to forget how many different types of startups there are and how they execute differently. For example most customer facing startups don't need stealth mode, they need MVP. Not true if your product is IP lead, in which case you need to be stealth while you secure IP rights and test the product internally.
There's a lot of massively useful advice coming out of SV - proven by startup after startup - but there is also a tendency to view all startups the same. The very fact that they are different means you need to have smart folk at the helm to navigate their own unique course based on the experiences of others.
University IP based endeavors tend to be non-software areas where patents are legitimately results of very expensive research endeavors staffed by multiple PhDs, not "using a database engine to store a wish list."
They do resemble patent trolls in that most of their business is licensing, not directly making products. However it is more based on selling: "Hey we have this cool technology, license it!" rather than showing up out of nowhere and extorting settlement.
More that the university gets a cut by licensing patents to the employee inventors, in exchange for incubation support. Not trolling the general business public.
For example, Google paid Stanford something like $1B in exchange for the patents of work developed by Googlers at the university.
Are there any restrictions selling food products from overseas, specifically in the US (FDA approvals, for example)?
In addition, is it also possible to run into export issues or licensing problems with the foreign candy/food makers?
I ask this because I've often thought about doing this for products from "back home", but ultmiately am stopped by stories about redistribution problems.
Nobody is going to steal your idea, but people will steal successful ideas. An idea is just that, nothing. Lots people come up with plenty of ideas. Many ideas will lead to nowhere and fail. People don't want to steal untried ideas cause they don't want the effort to find out if they work. Successful companies have tried numerous ideas and doing minor or major pivoting before landing on a workable idea. That is the one people will steal.
Excellent, feel free to publicly announce all your future projects prior to completion! :p Your competitor's would love to be first to market with some of your ideas.
An example being my company: I run a web hosting company (http://www.fused.com, y'know those antiquated LAMP stack ones that aren't cool around these parts) & it's an idea anyone & everyone can execute with some effort. Yay, launch a host today! Good luck.
The main company aside, I've got a few internal projects brewing that can, and will differentiate us from our competition (or, quickly turn into something we wholesell to them directly) that are far beyond run of the mill ideas.
Those 'secret sauces' are too all about execution, but I'd still like to be first to market with them :)
Hey, this is cool. I sent @bemmu an email a few months back asking him about Candy Japan and he sent me a list of all his competitors just like this article. I was stopping my Japancrate subscription because of the cost but I never did start a new one with anyone else. Seeing Candy Japan on here might convince me to subscribe for a bit.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadYou could barely it happened from the inside perspective, since the effect of competition was dominated by e.g. the business cycle, the whims of the Google gods, and my health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses.
For example, they'd have 6 months' lead on SEO, and on the paid acquisition channels they'd have either (a) CPC and LTV data that you'd still be guessing on; and (b) the ability to keep your bids arbitrarily high while you're still spinning up.
In other words: I think your sentiment is valid if you're both executing right now... but there's certainly some first-mover advantage.
Then yes, that would have been problematic, I guess?
The more meaningful question to me seems "Does BCC's modest success necessarily mean that the operators of pre-BCC competitors were worse off?" In the large, I'm thinking "Nope." DLTK Cards (no reason any of you would have heard of them, but its a mom-and-pop operation which does a variety of school printables, including bingo cards) is still up there and probably still worth several tens of thousands of dollars in AdSense revenue a year. (Might even be six figures.)
So I don't think the idea would have appealed to very many people to begin with. Even fewer would have had the motivation to actually create the product and do the work to market it, and go through the effort of A/B testing idea after idea to figure out the best way to sell it. And even if they had, the world is a big place. No business has a lock on 100% of its market.
The idea is something, but it's hardly the whole enchilada.
People will "steal" your idea as soon as they believe that it will be profitable to do so, even if you don't write blog posts about it. You have to realize that it's not theft to compete, it's just competition. If you started a chicken restaurant, some guy who opened the first chicken restaurant wouldn't have any claim to shut you down. Competition is part of business, and there's no doubt it's made our offering much better and provided motivation that is hard to drum up without an externality. Competition is good, even if it's often unpleasant.
Paid traffic is live by the sword, die by the sword; you can spin up a large audience fairly quickly using your checkbook but the next guy (with a large checkbook) can go outbid you. Boom, traffic drops. Blogging about paid traffic or how to improve conversion rates is suicidal.
The funny thing about SEO-based traffic models is Google is often very conservative about handing over the top spots if you're established in the niche. Established incumbents get the benefit of the doubt (from an algorithm perspective) in many major searches; I've seen old sites with very weak SEO and outdated offerings stand off new entrants (who execute better on the product & SEO fronts) for YEARS despite no content changes or link building.
Given that blogging usually helps your site rankings by a) feeding Google fresh content and b) earning a few backlinks and the most interesting story about a boring site is often how you promote it.... the extra kick from blogging may be the edge you need to stay on top in an SEO-driven category.
(obviously, if your initial SEO success was from buying 500 links from a black hat private blog network, you may want to keep your mouth shut....)
Did any of them ever change what you did or delivered to compete?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/07/31/samwer-brothe...
Then again, they're not copying ideas as much as successful implementations.
If a larger company had a larger budget and larger team than yours, BCC would have been crushed. However, there is little money in the business (If I recall, it was making ~#2500/month before you sold it) and it's most likely not worth the effort for so little return for a larger company. In most parts of the world $2500 is barely enough for one person to survive.
"Competition is not a key source of concern to your small business"
If your business is in an extremely small market, I agree. However, as soon as it seems like you are making money, competitors will come sniffing around and if they have a better plan than you, can put you out of business. I've seen it many times at small companies. They ignore the competition and suddenly find themselves going bankrupt because the majority of their customers left.
Living in Japan, I often hearing foreigners coming up with the great business idea of selling Japanese products back home. Candy is pretty common as an idea.
http://www.amazon.com/Tokyo-Banana-Cake-Ginza-Blanc/dp/B00O0...
These are only made by one specific place in Tokyo from what I know. They are also made fresh, and expire quickly. When you get them abroad you often have just 2-3 days to eat them.
There are several independent importers of small quanties the rest of Asia and elsewhere, and the prices go quite high, especially if they manage to get them quickly after they've made.
However if you come up with a truly new idea - a better compression algorithm for example - then the idea matters and execution matter as well. It's just truly new ideas are rare, and so the 'execution matters' mantra continues, because most new businesses aren't new ideas just different packaging.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/
Even if you have a good idea and even if you get it shipped, there won't be much help if there are many people out there who could do it better.
There are a bunch of rich business people out there with many years experience that can buy people much better than you at any time.
No business has 100% of its market. There are many profitable business that do not do everything as well as their competitors. They may be smaller, less efficient, less sophisticated---but they still attract enough customers to be a going concern. If I'm a customer, once I've made a purchase from you, you're a known quantity. Any competitor will seem like a risk. Evaluating whether it's worth changing takes effort, and unless I'm unhappy I probably won't do it.
Look at domain name registrars. There are hundreds. They all do pretty much the same thing. Some of them have really nice management tools, and some have really terrible ones. But even the terrible ones have repeat customers.
No matter how unique your concept is, the success or failure will anyway be determined by how well you compete with others doing the same thing, and this will have to be on the basis of execution.
Having said this importing containers is hardly cost free and requires good infrustucture in both countries to handle the process. It also ties up a lot of capital, but if you can achieve scale then it will allow you to deliver at a lower cost. Not so good for a hobby project though.
'One day, I had a craving for some Meiji Apollo Chocolates (one of the most popular chocolates in Japan), so I scoured the Internet looking for some. The only service I found was both expensive and slow as they ship from Japan. Nonetheless, I placed an order for about 10 candies to be shipped to me for around $40. 3 weeks later, I opened the package to find melted chocolate and broken hard candies because it was in transit for so long. I thought, there had to be a better way, thus Japan Crate was born.'
Their execution is quite impressive IMO and you could definitely take their example as inspiration yourself for iterative improvements: website, better packaging, bulk shipping, etc. Also, you could take a look at [2] and try to optimise for locations in that list - marketing, shipping, language, etc.
On another note, it's quite amusing, but fitting, that you both use Japanese style cartoons to explain the process to your audience!\
Good luck!
P.S I met Japan Crate's CEO at Collision Conf in May in Las Vegas - he's a cool guy and seriously passionate about getting Japanese candy to the world!
[1] http://japancrate.com/about [2] http://www.japan-talk.com/jt/new/6-biggest-Japanese-communit...
I think this has to do with the "someone has to touch it" premium that individual boxes have. In other words UPS ground in the US is $5 minimum (and that's with a big commercial discount) no matter how close the destination is and how light the box is. But 50lbs isn't $250, it might only be $35 or $70 depending on the distance.
It will be burned into all Intel CPU chips as a ROM in the factory.
However, if it's a fantastic idea, then keeping it tightly held certainly doesn't constitute undue paranoia. Especially if you're pre-traction.
I think mine is but many can't even get their heads around what I see as a simple concept...
IMO ideas need space and air to bloom, grow and flourish and you can't do that under lock and key.
I've only ever had a few of these ideas, and it took months to develop them to the point where I fully believed.
Upon sharing with people I trust, the reactions I received might have been approximated as anything from indifference to them secretly thinking "this guy is totally nuts." This in turn wavered my own belief.
Later, two of those very same ideas ended up successful YC companies.
The moral of the story is: if you need to seek external validation to confirm your own idea is fundamentally good or not, you probably have no business executing on it in the first place.
I know that flies contrary to the oft-repeated dogma of seeking validation at every step (market or otherwise), but having to do this in the first place - at least on a fundamental level - reflects negatively on one's sense of product. It also underscores a lack of vision, and I dare say vision is one part unwavering belief.
Generally speaking, unless you're having a casual chat with Sam Altman and Paul Graham, you probably want to trust your own laboriously-thought-out conclusions much more than you would someone else's off-hand opinion.
It boils down to a difficult psychological balancing act. On one hand, you need to drink your own Kool-Aid to a point where others view you as crazy. On the other, you need to be mindful of traps such as bias and fear creeping into your thought process, rendering you truly delusional.
>IMO ideas need space and air to bloom, grow and flourish and you can't do that under lock and key.
I would argue they can, provided they are continually evaluated and evolved with rigorous thought. That said, giving an idea space to breathe is certainly a positive thing and should be sought when appropriate.
I started spinning the idea for an asian snack box thereafter. I found you in 2011 and gave up on it.
By 2012 it became the default business model for online wantrepreneurs.
Then Cratejoy spun up in 2013 and went gangbusters in 2014.
Now in 2015 it's the late comers to the trend with most of the profitable niches already covered.
I imagine by 2016 with all the low hanging fruits taken you're gonna need to be a established player to play the game considering the logistics costs and distributing something of substance.
Then we'll be on to something else to copy.
Biggest lesson I took out of watching the mail order box business is more or less it's a marketing game. It's all pretty much the same but reaching the potential audience is the hardest part.
This isn't competition like McDonalds vs Burger King where you can just drive a block down to get a burger, it's competition to being first to introduce the idea of hamburgers.
The hardest part is still shipping.
When I looked into this the shipping was the killer, it eats up all possible margins until you get to scale. I learned about how FedEx and UPS works and how they handle last mile deliveries with the USPS and so on so forth.
Shyp is basically Postmate arbitraging on a national shipping account.
Amazon FBA is basically just Amazon arbitraging on Amazon.
That's the opportunity right there. Being somewhere in between Shyp and Amazon FBA. They call it 3PL, third party logistics provider.
You see that problem getting written about quite often. Everyone thinks they can solve it themselves but there's not quite a dedicated modern solutions provider.
But after working for a physical products company operating on a national level the only thing I've learned is that automating sending thousands of packages anywhere consistently is hard as all heck.
Birchbox found the best opportunity to capitalize on. They charge subscribers to receive a box of makeup samples. In other words they've convinced people to pay money for ads.
The COGS are basically free and on top of that they leverage and poll their subscriber base for data that gets sold right back to the manufacturers.
Everyone else is just trying to replicate Sears Roebuck but unable to convincingly explain their value proposition.
There's of course the counter-example of Steve Blank where his startup E.piphany's entire slide deck was stolen verbatim.. they failed though. Does that make them nobodies?
Imagine you have a biz that prints money. You literally have dump trucks that roll up to your gate every morning and unload, and amazingly you get to keep about half of it.
It's rare to create a business like that and if word gets out you'll have competitors swarming all over you driving down your margins until you're blowing every last cent trying to out market them and all that profitability will go away.
So you learn to STFU. Because people will steal your idea.
In the Valley among startups almost no-one is profitable and so it's all about sharing the love and lots of hugs because no one has anything to defend.
I've seen far more businesses fail due to traction problems than have succeeded and then been driven out due to margins.
Sure, it's possible--but if you've got 4 dump trucks of money pulling up instead of 5 this week, that's a better class of problem.
Obviously you think my post is a personal attack, yet i do not understand why.
Unless you care to hear them, i'll spare you the details, but i assure you i only intended to pointed something out that the person dearly needs to hear, in the hopes that it might lead them to introspection; not to attack them.
Two ways businesses print money: either be unique and capitalize on tiny amounts of large margins or be popular to capitalize on lots of tiny margins.
If it's popular and is profitable people will copy it. It's not that hard to reverse engineer products, most people just don't bother or try. Give me any CPG brand on the supermarket shelf right now and I can show you the supply chain and equipment needed to manufacture and deliver it.
Everything new gets commoditized eventually, especially considering it's all made in China anyways, and trickles through the global markets at various pacing.
That varying speed is the only competitive advantage one has. Your only job is to stay ahead of the game then when the game is boring sell that information to others to replicate. AKA franchising.
Then you keep spinning and spinning until 30 years later you can stand to wait around while others jump into a new market, burn out, and just take whatever you want out of that situation to come up with a new product and utilize your large economies of scale to immediately sell it in your extended network of retail stores that's making more per square foot than Tiffany's.
But do agree with the second part. Silicon Valley is just a giant R&D college campus built off other people's money experimenting on each other's child like sensibilities.
I love this. Very nicely said.
Bemmu gave me a lot of advice at the last HN Kansai meetup to find more customers... thank you again Bemmu :)
At first I hesitated to do it the other way around: to import French wine in Japan and sell it as a subscription, but from the outside it seems harder. The rules for importing goods (especially alcohol) are quite a bit harder than the rules for exporting...
The free worldwide shipping is a huge thing.
How is it going? What are the next steps?
Thinking of offering more products/different kind of plans.
We are also still trying to figure out exactly the right price-point, so tweaking a bit the price/amount of tea. I have an Ask HN to do about that by the way...
Do not hesitate to ask us anything about Tomotcha if you need more information about the service! Note that when you signup you can drop us an email to tell us that it's just for trial: you will be charged exactly once, and receive exactly one shipment. We should make a dedicated button to automate this process...
Nothing useful here. Waste of time. Buried.
From the moment the business had this idea I forwarded them your blog and website, don't think they really appreciated the amount of knowledge present there.
As an immigrant in Japan you're an inspiration for launching my own business (one day).
Some startups can execute better than you and can be better funded. Remember Hojoki anyone, nope - Slack moved fast got the momentum, scaled and wham! Hojoki used to be better than Slack btw. However if you operate in the public arena most people will know or guess your plan as soon as you spin up your MVP anyway :)
Right now down to the elephant in the room. Apple regularly release products/features that look remarkably like 3rd party apps, but not enough to be sued. So yep, idea stolen, implemented and market cornered by a virtual monopoly.
The truth is a complicated thing and the word Nobody is just factually inaccurate.
I'd go with:
'You're more like to fail executing than have your idea stolen.'
:)
In regards to comments about IP :- compression and encryption are two obvious IP led areas. But also those working in the cutting 'technical' edge - such as high speed trading may well have solid IP.
The thing is a lot of SV based startups (a lot, not all!) are driven to solve customer/logistic problems not technical problems so they are less likely to have IP - unless (grrrr...) you count business practises as IP.
However startups out of a University incubator are more likely to be solving technical challenges and therefore have richer IP. As seen by the comments :-)
The light is shone so strongly on public facing SV startups it's easy for us to forget how many different types of startups there are and how they execute differently. For example most customer facing startups don't need stealth mode, they need MVP. Not true if your product is IP lead, in which case you need to be stealth while you secure IP rights and test the product internally.
There's a lot of massively useful advice coming out of SV - proven by startup after startup - but there is also a tendency to view all startups the same. The very fact that they are different means you need to have smart folk at the helm to navigate their own unique course based on the experiences of others.
I actually can't think of any, other than video game companies, and even then, it's probably more about execution/marketing/SEO than the IP itself.
They do resemble patent trolls in that most of their business is licensing, not directly making products. However it is more based on selling: "Hey we have this cool technology, license it!" rather than showing up out of nowhere and extorting settlement.
For example, Google paid Stanford something like $1B in exchange for the patents of work developed by Googlers at the university.
In addition, is it also possible to run into export issues or licensing problems with the foreign candy/food makers?
I ask this because I've often thought about doing this for products from "back home", but ultmiately am stopped by stories about redistribution problems.
https://sivers.org/multiply
Excellent, feel free to publicly announce all your future projects prior to completion! :p Your competitor's would love to be first to market with some of your ideas.
An example being my company: I run a web hosting company (http://www.fused.com, y'know those antiquated LAMP stack ones that aren't cool around these parts) & it's an idea anyone & everyone can execute with some effort. Yay, launch a host today! Good luck.
The main company aside, I've got a few internal projects brewing that can, and will differentiate us from our competition (or, quickly turn into something we wholesell to them directly) that are far beyond run of the mill ideas.
Those 'secret sauces' are too all about execution, but I'd still like to be first to market with them :)
Modern responsive funky website ... tick!