1. Relevance The one classic question: Is that what the customer really want? Start up is about solving problems which can either make the customer become a better person or make their job easier. Search engine value the same thing. When you are trying to get high rank in the Google-for instance, you must build content that perfectly answers the question the people search in the search box. Moreover, SEO (search engine optimization) is not only evaluating a piece content of yours, it analyze a lot of factor such as the URL, others content, bla.. bla.. To sum up, it puts everything into the measurement. Then, I know to start up is just as same as that. When a customer or an investor get hook into my start up. The first thing catches their eyes is a great product that they are willing to pay. But, that is not enough. I call it the SO process (starting up optimization), build start up from the base. All things matter. The product. The location. The niche. The people. The competition. And a lot more. 2. Search Volume I should ask myself: How big is the market? While we use SEO to increase the traffic to our website to promote our product and service. If we try to optimize the keyword that no one (or only a very very small number of people) care about. That is not a good move. Well. I agree that we can advertise that keyword to make the internet get used to it. That is going to take a lot of time and money from your budget. In a seminar at Stanford University, a Facebook’s manager said that we should know is that really a people problem. In this case, people search for it. They care. so, that is a people problem that we need to solve. We should choose to innovate from 1 to n rather that from 0 to 1 (Peter Theil’s definition). We might not make history. But, the fact is that we will have more chance to survive because we knew that the people are looking for the solution for the problem — I mean a good number. 3. Competition Monopoly is difficult. Don’t do that if you don’t want to. However, don’t jump to a too crowded market. SEO uses the long-tail keyword to attack the niche. Start up makes distinctive features to escape from the competition. Again. From Peter Thiel. Competition is for the loser. That’s true unless your company is as big as Facebook, then it is OK to compete. I feel sorry for Snapchat because Facebook has just release copycat-stories features. See. The competition is hot now. I think thriving well means making well the distinctive feature that can avoid unnecessary competition. Facebook just allowed the user to react to the content. That is new, and nobody tries to copy. Why? Competition? I knew you knew why Facebook knew that the competition knew not to copy from them
