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I am currently building a few products, one of them is a copy cat but the others are more innovative. Where do you stand on copying an idea that wors in the US and applying it in the middle east. I have seen very few companies innovate here, Maktoob is a copy of Yahoo and so are many others, nly a few startups are innovating. Is it necessary to innovate to be successful or can you just copy cat |
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I fully agree with Mohammed's take on this. The Arab internet audience naturally follows global web trends, but with a very unique twist. For example, I was trying to gauge the use of Twitter in Arab markets a while back to see how best to position our social marketing efforts, and I realized that besides the 'web elite' (which more or less mirrors the international 'web elite' trends albeit occasionally in Arabic), the mass GCC market uses Twitter as a chat tool. Seriously - it reminded me of the old mIRC days! Now I haven't really used Watwet or any of the other Arabic Twitter clones, but I would say the opportunity there is to develop an interface that follows the chat conversation, rather than just treat the feed as a micro-blogging site. You see where I'm going with this? The Arab world comes with its own luxury brand baggage of requirements, restrictions, social/cultural/religious/political landmine - but at the same time, represents for local developers a great opportunity to custom tailor web offerings to it. If Yahoo! had come in ten years ago on their own, they might never have tapped into Arabs' obsession with forums - which really is where Maktoob grew its user base. A simple cut and paste job will rarely work, and when it does it won't hit the mass market that a custom offering would. Having said that, it would also be dangerous for you to assume consistency of requirement across the Middle East. We may all speak the same language, but we certainly do not consume the web uniformly. One of the first lessons I learnt was that an aesthetically appealing, minimalistic site with a single cool function would work brilliantly in the levant, but would fail on its head in the GCC. Similarly, a content heavy, fully Arabic portal with little design would become the top destination in Saudi, but would have zero traction in Lebanon or Jordan. Egypt tends to be the happy middle ground. Bottom line - you really do have to innovate. You may not be innovating from scratch, and by all means any web app that works in the US would most likely be needed in our market, but that customization job is what will differentiate you from all the other copycats. |
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حظوظ نجاح الأفكار المبتكرة أفضل من تقليد الأفكار الناجحة عالميا. لكن ثمة عددا من المشاريع الناجحة في أمريكا، بالإمكان تقليدها عربيا مع إضفاء لمسة عربية عليها، والابتكار قليلا في التنفيذ، وسوف تنجح نجاحا معقولا. لو نظرنا إلى الصين لوجدنا الكثير من مشاريع الويب الناجحة هنالك هي مجرد تقليد حرفي للمواقع الأمريكية، مع ذلك النسخ المقلدة ناجحة أكثر من النسخ الأصلية، المتوفرة باللغة الصينية. ربما طبيعة المجتمع الصيني ساعدت على نجاح "الأفكار المقلدة". ونظرا لبعض التشابهات بين بعض الدول العربية والصين يمكن للأفكار المقلدة أن تنجح عربيا، وهذا فعلا ما هو حاصل الآن. لكن التقليد سهل. وكما تقلد أنت سيقلد آخرون. النجاح هنا صعب بعض الشيء. من الأفضل الاعتماد على الابتكار. قد لا تنجح بسرعة، لكنك ستساهم في تشكيل وعي جديد لدى مستخدمي الإنترنت العرب. |
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Personally, I find that it's one of those things where sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I think the question goes a little bit deeper - You can copycat and succeed if there is a market that needs your product. Think about MySpace and Facebook. Facebook was a copy of MySpace, but myspace was not serving the market properly. It's one of those things where you either have to perfectly understand your users (very hard!) or build something quickly, evolve it, and see if it sticks. |
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In MENA region, there's so much gap that needs to be filled first. I think it doesn't make sense to start building products that sounds very "innovative", but doesn't fill the gap first. And from a statistical point of view, it's more likely for new useful web products in MENA to be copy cats, simply because someone else in silicon valley thought about it and implemented it before. And why is that? Because the guys at silicon valley had the ecosystem for this ready long time ago. And if we'll ask another why? it will not be the last :) When Google started for example, there was no proper search engine that serves the exponential growth of the web content. So there was this gap that Google exploited through the introduction of PageRank and fast indexing. And this was fueled by their extensive investment in innovation. I think it's ok to copy cat at this time, but we still can take those copy catted ideas and build on top of them through innovation. Innovation that is fed by our needs. Innovation can be triggered by cultural, social, and economic properties that makes each place different. |
