I think the people advocating against "me too" companies had in mind the people who thought they could make a Facebook killer by copying them and adding that one extra feature/twist that would compel everyone to switch over.
I think the big lesson to learn here is to carefully evaluate the microeconomics of the market you want to get into. To compete as a bootstrapped startup, you'd want:
So for the time tracker example, you can start the business for the price of web hosting, LLC paperwork and software development. However, you'd probably want to invest time to make it easy for customers to switch from competing services.
agreed. however, imo, the big one that people overlook is the 'network effects' one. just as it would be appealing to be facebook, trying to become the next facebook is darn near impossible because of the network effects.
Getting someone to use your timetracker can be an uphill battle, but unless they're deriving value from other people using the same timetracker, you've got a fighting chance of at least convincing them to give it a try. But if much of the value they get from timetrackerX is that all their friends and clients are also on it, and they share time info around... it's extremely hard to even begin to compete with that, because it's not a feature you can replicate.
I think the big lesson to learn here is to carefully evaluate the microeconomics of the market you want to get into. To compete as a bootstrapped startup, you'd want:
1) No/low barriers to entry 2) No/low switching costs 3) No/low network effects
So for the time tracker example, you can start the business for the price of web hosting, LLC paperwork and software development. However, you'd probably want to invest time to make it easy for customers to switch from competing services.