Less Is More

Some teams feel discouraged to pursue novel ideas thinking they'll quickly get copied & commoditized by bigger players.

Consider this:

#Snapchat invented the wildly popular "Stories" concept back in 2013. Soon after its success, Facebook rolled out its own version.

Years later, #TikTok released a video-version of Stories. This was shortly imitated by #Instagram Reels & other apps.

Google+ introduced Circles to enable users to post to certain groups of friends. This inspired the roll out of #Facebook Lists.

Then, #Clubhouse rose to quick fame with their audio-broadcast model. Twitter followed suit & produced Spaces.

Now, notice how none of the original products (with the exception of Google+ for other various reasons) were ousted due to this act of copying.

Why?

While larger players have access to resources & a massive user base, their growing feature density is also their weakness.

Continuing to "bundle" shiny new functionality also means it's easy for them to get lost in their larger narrative.

Smaller players, however, have the advantage of ruthless focus.

Ex: FB could've added Instagram-like features to their app but the latter's singular focus on photo sharing made its value proposition simple & appealing.

Often, less is more.