Barriers to entry

Everyone wants to start a business, attract customers and keep making money forever. It doesnt work like that, once your business becomes successful, be sure that competition will show up at your door. The major saving grace you have are the barriers to entry for new comers into your business sector.

The harder the barriers to entry, the safer you are.

Google search is probably the best example of this, Google has run away with the search market and almost no one is doing (or can do anything) about it. If you wanted to start a Search business today, the entry barriers are to build a powerful search engine and then do a good marketing job to convince the world you are better than Google.

That is beginning to look like mission impossible! Microsoft with all their muscle have tried and tried and yet, they are not making any headway.

Facebook also enjoys some barriers to entry. The major barrier is that for a social networking site to boom, you need people. Without your friends and fans on Facebook, the website loses its value.

I do not go to Facebook to interact with Facebook, I go there to interact with my friends, people who care about me and I care about enough to check on them. (You see how this differs greatly from Google search’s service?)

This is why a million cool features on Google+ cannot switch me over, without people I can interact with, Google+ remains a ghost town to me.

Let us talk about you, that your brilliant idea… what are the barriers to entry?

Can you hold your own when competition knocks?

Food for thought, certainly!
M.