Whether to purchase or otherwise, most of us reach amazon.com when we try searching for a book on the internet. Barnes & Noble too has an online bookstore but certainly not as popular as Amazon’s. And today as we know it, Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world doing sales (~19 billion!) about three times as much as the closest competition Staples.
Ok, that’s what many of us know. Did you know of a site called books.com? This site (now redirects to Barnes & Nobel site) was there on the internet selling books two years before Amazon was started by Jeff Bezos. Charles Stack, books.com founder, apparently was an ‘inside guy’ more interested in building an infrastructure than promoting a business. The price for being an insider guy? In 1996, Stack sold his business for $4.2 million while a month later Amazon was able to mop up a staggering $32 million in its first IPO!
Stack lost out because he did not let enough people know about his site. He had a two year headstart over Amazon and yet he was not able to own the online retail market at least for books (even with a killer of a domain named books.com!) In today’s internet age, one barely has a headstart. Somehow word gets to the competition and the so-called first-mover advantage is hard to realize. Imagine having spent a lot on R&D, successfully seeing the release and working of a great feature, not having this publicized and the very next year your competition does the same feature but makes more news of it and before you know it they’re touted the pioneer, cutting-edge, industry-leading blah blah.
If you are innovating, make sure you let your market know; else you could actually be signing off your hardwork to competition. Make sure to be the first-announcer and constantly follow up with your marketing and PR departments!
#1 by Manoj Thansi on March 7, 2010 - 5:32 am
i loved this
#2 by Balogun, Nigeria on June 25, 2010 - 6:08 am
Stack sold his biz for $4.2m, that is okay. He too made his millions. He knew his limitation and exit early.
Jeff was an investment banker. He was not a programmer. He knew how to raise money. So, he leveraged his experience.
Amazon will not be forever!. A major catastrophy can happen to amazon. They are expanding too fast.
For, instance, ebay was a leader earlier on. Now, they are not the in-thing. Amazon has taken over.
I forsee google taking on amazon, using different tactics!