Building a Better Mousetrap

We are often told the sentiment that in order to be successful, we need to come up with a unique idea that no one has done before and that is going to change the way we do things forever. Take companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple as example… Or maybe don’t.

Fact is, all these three companies were not pioneers in their industries (i.e. when they first started up, the business idea they were based on was not new at all and already executed by others).

Long before Google started up, Yahoo was the king in online search. Before Facebook, there was Friendster, Myspace, etc. and all with respectable amounts of users at their peaks. And Apple didn’t invent the first computer, the first music player, or the first phone – back in 2007 Nokia was the largest hardware manufacturer for mobile phones, and no one would have thought the iPhone could take away so much market share from the Finnish Giant. Yet all three are now arguably the indisputable leaders in their industries and have grown to become part of the most successful companies of all time.

An interesting observation about established companies who pioneered their industry is that once they get to the top, they tend to become lazy.

And that’s where the opportunity lies for entrepreneurs like us, to catch Goliath off-guard.

Yahoo! for example failed to innovate in search and instead focused on becoming a media company. A year or two later, Google caught up and before the execs at Yahoo knew it, gone were the days of their search engine dominance.

Now you might be intimidated by taking on big names, and I am not encouraging anyone to build another Facebook for example – that in fact would be a stupid thing to do. People don’t want another social network to sign up for, and convincing Facebook’s almost 1 billion users to do so is close to impossible. However, are there any features that Facebook offers that can be done better, if that was the sole focus of a company? Heck yes, and the mobile app Instagram is a prime example for this. The app’s creators realized that because Facebook has so many different features (photos, video, articles, groups, etc.) it simply can’t offer the best and most innovative experience for each to their users. The creators of Instagram spotted this opportunity, and 2 years and 25 million users later, Instagram’s net worth was $1 billion, and the company was bought – by Facebook (#irony).

(how Instagram, an app that has never made a single $ in revenue is worth $1,000,000,000 is a whole other story that deserves a blog post on its own)

Why reinvent the wheel, when you can just build a better mousetrap?

My point is that we do not necessarily need a brand new, never-been-done-before idea for our business to achieve success, but should look at successful companies with a critical eye and ask “how can I do this better?”

(this is a revised repost of an article I wrote for another site last year, the original one can be found here)

Any thoughts on what I posted? I'd love to hear, please leave me a comment below.