Low barriers to entry are awesome

I attended Gluecon last week.  It was awesome.  I had a phenomenal time talking to some really smart people.  While I was talking to someone at one of the demo booths about FourthSegment, one of my all-time favorite lines came up: “Yeah but it sounds like there’s a low barrier to entry there.”

I smiled.  ”Hell yeah there is.”

“But what if someone copies your idea?” said my new buddy.

“Then that means I’m on to something” I replied with a huge smile on my face.

Let me very clear: I love low barriers to entry.

At it’s core, the idea for FourthSegment is a straightforward idea.  You can go to our homepage, see what we’re doing, and if you’re really good you can probably code up a tech demo in a few days.  If you’re average, you can probably do it in 2 weeks.

But if you think for one second that FourthSegment is just a website - that you can just go copy our functionality and make money - then you’re not getting it.

FourthSegment, like all ideas with apparent ‘low barriers to entry’ came out of the collective intelligence of a couple founders who were searching for an idea for years, scores of meetings with hundreds of people, and some really difficult realizations along the way.

Every single inclusion and omission in what is about to be the first version of FourthSegment is the result of these discussions.

  • Why do we only let people share on Twitter and Facebook and not over email?  You would have had to have listened in on a 2 hour conversation Jonathan and I had at 2am a few weeks back.
  • Why are we going to be charging right out of the gate?  That’s something I’ve thought about for years.  Another 100 hours of conversations, reading, and thinking over past several years, combined with the mistakes I made at MessageSling.
  • Why aren’t we providing any kind of dashboard to visitors?  That something that could actually be pretty valuable.  There are times where I’ve wanted it for myself.  The decision to ditch that came from some experiences that Jonathan and I had while working on our last idea.

And a 80 other things.

The bottom line is that a low barrier to entry means that the product is streamlined — optimized.  Copying functionality might get some dollars in your pocket, but they’ll never make you a market leader.

So if you think there’s a low barrier to entry when it comes to any product, I encourage you to put your money where your mouth is and try to compete.  It’s never as easy as you think.