Discuss: Resist the urge to copy your competitor even if they’re a lot bigger than you

I joined Orkut, a social networking website by Google, around 10 years ago. Soon, I was connected with all my high school and college friends online. It was THE social network (at least in India and Brazil) at the time. No one really talked about Facebook back then.

There was a lot happening on the site. For instance, a community named “India” had more than 1 million members. It was a super active community, too—you post a topic and, within seconds, you’d see 25 to 30 replies. There were thousands of such active communities on Orkut. It was a thriving social network much like Facebook is today.

It was my first experience with a social network. I got so intrigued that I decided to develop my own. While I never succeeded at that, it helped me learn more about what was happening in the space and especially about Facebook.

I created my first profile on Facebook sometime in 2007, but found the site confusing and far less intuitive than Orkut. I found the concept of a “wall” and status updates really lame compared to Orkut’s “scrapbook.” In addition, none of my friends were on Facebook. I abandoned it and didn’t return for almost a year.

In late 2007 to early 2008, Orkut started experimenting with status updates and something along the lines of Facebook’s news feed. These were really annoying features. I could sense that Google was focusing too much on its American competitor, as their top management was based in the US and was probably getting paranoid about Facebook (a dominant social network in the country).

When you focus too much on your competition, you end up copying elements that are, at best, your guesses on what’s working for them. In the process, you are actually ruining your existing product experience and, at the same time, “training” your users for your competition’s platform.

You can’t replace your core value proposition and focus on existing consumers with your competitors’ popular features, especially if you are in it for the long run.

I returned to Facebook again in early 2008 to connect with my future University of California classmates in the US. This time around, Facebook looked a lot more familiar than the last time (thanks to Orkut). Now, I got Facebook’s core features like status updates and the News Feed. These features looked a lot more natural on Facebook than on Orkut, too.

For a couple of months, a majority of my Facebook friends were still my US classmates. However, by mid-2008, I had started receiving friend requests from my Orkut friends as well. And within a few months, my Orkut network became a subset of my Facebook network.

Orkut got even more paranoid. This was clear in its 2009 redesign, which looked even more similar to Facebook. Soon, people started flocking away from the site, and it never recovered from that point on.

We can point to many reasons why Orkut lost—spam, bugs, privacy issues, etc. However, I believe that their excessive focus on their competition was the primary factor behind their undoing.

Today, I am building Wishfie, a platform where people can share their opinions. And one of the common questions I get is what if Facebook, Google, or some well-funded startup builds the same feature. My answer always is this:

Let’s discuss: