Take Groupon for example. It made something a lot of people wanted. Could most people on Hacker News have made it? Sure.
But Groupon created it before anyone else (I might be wrong about this?).
Group buying has been done many, many times before, going back to the bubble. Many millions of dollars were burned to little avail. What Groupon actually nailed was all the hard parts of the business model that don't look really freaking difficult on the napkin -- particularly "signing up local merchants" and "cost-effective customer acquisition."
That second one is relevant for virtually all businesses and gets disproportionately short shrift here.
>What Groupon actually nailed was all the hard parts of the business model that don't look really freaking difficult on the napkin -- particularly "signing up local merchants" and "cost-effective customer acquisition."
I may be misunderstanding what you're saying, but signing up local merchants doesn't seem all that hard. There seem to be many Groupon clones that have produced deals with merchants.
The main problem for the clones is not having Groupon's scale/distribution.
I think what Groupon got right was the simplicity of its offering.
One page that clearly explains what you're getting, at at least 50% off.
When looking at an offering, I see a picture, a short and sometimes funny/interesting description of the offering, short crisp bullet points about restrictions, how many people have bought it, how much time is left, and contact info -- specifically where the place is located.
That's really easy to understand. The user can vote yes or no in a minute or two.
Focusing on the hard parts is a commonality to just about every successful startup story. It's not always pretty or interesting, but the business flows to their doorstep because competitors can't get the hard stuff right or keep up. Startup security is doing both what is hard and not attractive repeatedly until it looks both easy and fun.
Group buying has been done many, many times before, going back to the bubble. Many millions of dollars were burned to little avail. What Groupon actually nailed was all the hard parts of the business model that don't look really freaking difficult on the napkin -- particularly "signing up local merchants" and "cost-effective customer acquisition."
That second one is relevant for virtually all businesses and gets disproportionately short shrift here.