Copying is Good! Crystal Balling is Not.
I recently posted a blog on my Trysts with Housing.com. An upcoming blog-site reposted it with a misrepresentative summary and highly sensationalist headline unduly emphasizing my post as an accusation of housing copying RoomLion (I will not bring more traffic to them by linking them here). I figured, I will first express my opinion on the highly overused, abused and misunderstood term — “Copy”
Much more than the best form of flattery!
For beginners, anyone who calls Flipkart a copy of Amazon should ask their own parents why they did not innovate some new positions and rather just copied the age old process of conceiving them.
By that definition, Google is a copy of Alta Vista.
I would go one step further and say that there is no Internet enabled business that can ever be started which has not been done by someone else already with a slight variation in flavor. That is until you get into the details.
I am a strong believer in not reinventing the wheel and rather reusing best practices from the industry. A lot of UX practices on RoomLion have been inspired by other websites. Heck my spec for RoomLion’s homepage was to copy Zomato’s homepage. Most of Housing.com was made up of carefully selected copies from across the world. Right from their map based search to slice view. And those were excellent copies.
Now there are some stupid examples of copies. For example, in one of the investor pitches, I was asked to reposition RoomLion along the lines of Oyo. They were essentially asking me to copy Oyo. That would be astronomically foolish. For starters, I have a contrarian opinion on Oyo’s business model and topline driven execution — which will be its own blog post on another day. But why would I want to copy Oyo in the same geography, to target the same customers, using the same business model — if I cannot do a better job at it than them?
Small Start-ups Help Fill in the Numbers in Financial Models All the Time!
Now back to my blog post on Housing.com. When you are running a startup of any size, especially the size of Housing.com which had more money than ways to spend it and investors more demanding than ancient slave drivers, any insight into the prospects of a strategic direction are very valuable. Each founder in that position is trying to find a white crystal ball very similar to the one in which Devanand in Teen Devian gazed to pick his life partner from three potential suitors. In fact, investors do this all the time. Any time an analyst at a venture firm contacts you to know more about your startup, 9 out of 10 times the partner is in late-stage discussions of investing in another company in your domain. They are just collecting data to support the partners decision and benchmark the other company’s numbers.
I argue that Housing.com used RoomLion as that crystal ball to project its future in the temporary housing domain. Having access to RoomLion’s performance data bolstered their confidence in investing in this domain. That is how Rahul went from “I have no interest in serviced apartments” during my first meeting in June 2013 to “let’s launch a serviced apartment category” in December 2014.
Fear of the Unkown is Much More than that of the Known
Since the time our acquisition fell apart, I was paranoid about Housing.com applying even some porition of its $100M arsenal in creating a temporary housing category. At RoomLion, we did not have a single penny in external investment. I was sure they were working on it internally and would launch it anytime soon. But often times people make crazy demonic assumptions about the unknown, while the inside story is often far less fearful. A bluff is fearful only until it gets called. I was afraid of potential competition from Housing.com until the day they finally launched that vertical. When I saw their product, I learnt that there was nothing to fear. All that money still did not help them build a compelling product. I learnt that it is more important to focus on keeping your head-down and executing. Giving it your best shot.
And this my friend was yet another sour grape from my startup experience.
