It wasn't the Google who killed the startup, it was the OP. YouTube is <i>already</i> a threat to gaming video services, even without a specialized offering. Still, Twitch took off.<p>If YouTube was going to be YouTube of gaming, then OP could have been Vimeo of gaming. I mean seriously, if Vimeo could be a profitable enterprise with a <i>free, good enough</i> YouTube, then so could them.<p>I'm not sure about other people, but events like these are usually more telling of myself than the deterrent. Almost every idea would have extreme challenges on the way. If I was the OP I would conclude that Google brought out my own insecurity about the product to surface. Nobody gives up on the castle they want to live in.<p>EDIT: The irony here is that he seems to have forgotten how YouTube was successful despite Google Video.
"Along the way, we learned an enormous amount about building a startup, pitching potential investors, and things such as cap tables, term sheets, Series A rounds, company valuation. It felt like a real-world MBA crash course."<p>You learned everything about building a startup except building a profitable, sustainable business. Everything else is secondary.
TL;DR playing video games is easier than starting a real company so let's do that instead.<p>His analogy of participating in a "boss fight" is flawed since it sounds more like they just turned off the game system as soon as a hint of the boss monster's first tentacle even appeared on the screen.
Their description of the business model is to be gamefaqs.com, only with videos instead of text. As an avid gamer, that sounds:<p>- very niche, their intended content would only be a small fraction of what yt gaming will offer (it focuses on live streams)<p>- very unattractive, since learning how to play the game by exploring it is the fun of it<p>- very unmonetizable, given that people can get the very same content, for free, in a format that's much easier to digest<p>I don't think they needed to invoke google to throw in the gauntlet.
GameFAQS.com has been around since the 90s. They housed both user-submitted and commercial guides/tips/cheats/etc, and <i>free</i>.<p>Now, this guy has a great principle on the tech giants being a threat for a competitive, efficient economy, but I'm just not with him on this one. His only marketable niche would be to get the top paid gaming professionals (like the Dota 2 team that won $6million this month), and provide a market place for the top talent to coach, but he didn't see that, and it's a very small niche to begin with.
Their product wasn't really revolutionary - it didn't present anything new. By their own accounts, there was nothing stopping Lynda.com from offering the exact same service (along with a multitude of other online course/video services).<p>Google didn't kill their startup, their own naivity did.
This reminds me of the story of Blizzard seeing Dominion Storm at E3 in 1996. After seeing the demo, they felt like they should kill Starcraft because of how much "better" Ion Storm's demo was than their own.<p>Turns out is was mostly smoke and mirrors, and Blizzard made an exceptional game because of it.<p><a href="http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-go-down-in-flames" rel="nofollow">http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-go-d...</a>
>After all, one solid axiom of business: It’s hard for your better, paid service to compete against a “good-enough” free offering.<p>Hopefully for the sake of FastMail, Rackspace, et al, Google never tries their hand at email...
Had they followed the Lydia.com approach more closely, they could've competed and done quite well.<p>If I want to learn how to program, there are a TONS and I mean TONS of free resources everywhere on the internet - very similar to all of the game faqs people keep referencing. And yet, Lydia still makes a ton of money because their service is sold as a subscription based service which is much better than other resources on the internet.<p>If you do a good job of marketing this and sell it as a premium service, I'm sure they would've done just fine. Also, if they do make a dent in Google's service, you can bet their ass, they'd be calling about acquiring them in short order, which would have made a nice payday for them<p>Instead, they bailed at the first opportunity. To me, it doesn't sound like their hearts were really in it.
Your biggest problem is you tried to create a product out of thin air.<p>You want to monetize video content? Guess what the best platform to do that is? YouTube.<p>I don't know why you would even consider building your own competing platform when YouTube is right there waiting and offers everything you need. There are countless examples of strong businesses that have grown out of publishing YouTube video content.<p>If you really believe there is a niche for the content, then this development hasn't changed that at all. If anything it just pivots you away from the silly idea of building a platform, toward the real value of the offering.<p>I realize it's not as 'sexy' just to publish YouTube videos, but it's a far more sensible approach.
although it might be heart sinking i don't think google really killed it in this case. The company gave up at the threat of competing with google. Killing something is more like what twitter did to meerkat to push periscope. My personal opinion only.
Isn't part of writing a business plan doing the scenarios of what happens should company X or any other competition enter the space and pitching what would be your competitive advantage. Who plans a non-technical business on the basis of 'no one else will have this idea'. It sounds to me like the OP had a poor business plan to begin with. The fact that there were people willing to fund this just shows that in this bubble will throw money at anything.
So what is this about? The horror of competing with a bigger company? Google didn't kill your startup, You did. You did that after You got scared and didn't have nothing interesting/unique to compete with them. Stop crying, most people are in debt to the rest of their lives after their companies fail.
> Our hearts sunk. They were pretty much already working on what we had been planning – and they are going to give it away for free.<p>Selling below cost price is considered anti-competitive, and is illegal in many countries.