Quote:
Originally Posted by latepaul
I suspect that without a lot of start-up money cash-flow would be a very tricky balance. Probably you'd either fail completely or level out at a small-to-medium size site (1,000s users) where you couldn't grow easily to the next level without more money. Which could be fine but certainly not an Amazon-killer.
There is a solution to the money issue: find a big backer prepared to invest lots of money up front and wait months or years for you to establish yourself before you're profitable. That gives you time to develop the site. Time to attract users. Time to attract advertisers. However that's basically what Goodreads did and they probably would never have got the VC money if they had hamstrung themselves by promising never to capitalize on one of the biggest assets they had - the user data.
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Plus, as Daffy Duck pointed out, the best acts only work once.
There is no guarantee a straight GR clone would ever get enough traction to get going. It may simply be too late in the game to start now with a few hundred reviews to compete against a site with millions.
Look at whats happened to Google+ in trying to take on Facebook.
Online communities live or die by network effects so unless there is a massive stampede away from GR the likelihood of anybody acquiring a critical mass of membership to be a real competitor seems unlikely.
That right there might be why Amazon got Shelfari for (a reported) $10M but had to cough up (an estimated) $150M for GR.