Blog

Answer­ing Umair’s ques­tions:

What do you think next-gen strate­gies look and feel like? Can you name a com­pany that’s a good exam­ple? What’s dif­fer­ent about them – what’s their advan­tage built on?

I pro­posed to take TripIt and Dopplr as a case study. Their—now intertwined—future should pro­vide insights on the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the com­pet­i­tive advan­tages they’re using.

Let me start by pre­sent­ing these two com­pa­nies and the way they’re com­pet­ing. Then we will look at them from a strat­egy stand­point and explore what com­pet­i­tive advan­tages they seem to be using, and how that will likely evolve. Already famil­iar with these ser­vices ? Skip to the strat­egy part.

His­tory

Tripit launched with a unique fea­ture and value propo­si­tion. Fre­quent trav­el­ers spend a lot of time keep­ing track of their var­i­ous travel plans, and input­ing them in a vari­ety of tools (per­sonal cal­en­dar, cor­po­rate cal­en­dar) and devices. Tripit propo­si­tion is to let it do that. You for­ward all your travel con­fir­ma­tion emails to plans@tripit.com and let them extract the use­ful info, put that into a cal­en­dar with addi­tional infor­ma­tion (maps, weather, etc.) and finally pro­vide you with a “clean” iCal feed (con­tain­ing every­thing) that you can plug in any tool accept­ing iCal.

This was their core. They started well and kept refin­ing the ser­vice with addi­tional func­tion­al­i­ties (like allow­ing an assis­tant to man­age your travel plans, etc.). They also added the usual layer of Social Net­work­ing func­tions, allow­ing you to con­nect to oth­ers, share your plans, col­lab­o­rate on travel plan­ning, etc.

Dopplr launched for its part as a pure social net­work for fre­quent trav­el­ers, with a sin­gle fea­ture: reg­is­ter your travel plans and con­nec­tions, and Dopplr alerts you when­ever you and your con­nec­tions are in the same loca­tion at the same time. They also started well and kept refin­ing the ser­vice with addi­tional func­tion­al­i­ties, but the core was these alerts.

Con­cep­tu­ally, think of Dopplr as a tool that allows you to man­age the sub­set of your social con­tacts you would like to meet with when you or they are trav­el­ing. At its begin­ning, and even today, Dopplr could have pro­vided the same ser­vice as a Face­book appli­ca­tion, for example.

Tripit meets Dopplr. Though obvi­ously in the same mar­ket, these two appar­ently ignored each other, until recently. Tripit, expand­ing its social net­work­ing func­tion­al­i­ties, added “close­ness” alerts, alert­ing you when you will be in the same loca­tion as one of your con­nec­tion. Yes, it’s exactly Dopplr’s features.

Strat­egy

From a strat­egy per­spec­tive, Dopplr and Tripit dif­fers significantly.

Tripit built has a strong and unique com­pet­i­tive advan­tage (CA) with its email extrac­tion tech­nol­ogy. It can pro­vide a highly val­ued fea­ture which is likely dif­fi­cult to repli­cate. Its other fea­tures are clas­si­cal social net­work­ing and close­ness alerts, which do not pro­vide any dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from Dopplr. In terms of design, the site and user expe­ri­ence has been well thought out, but with­out being mind blowing.

Dopplr on the other hand based all its strat­egy on a few CA that Umair would prob­a­bly char­ac­ter­ized as next-gen:

• Very skilled at con­nect­ing with thought-leaders and the blo­gos­phere: Dopplr launched with an incred­i­ble buzz and this atten­tion is sus­tained. It receives way more cov­er­age than Tripit. This is due to the skills and con­nec­tion of the peo­ples onboard.
• An empha­sis and efforts on achiev­ing rad­i­cally new design and user expe­ri­ence. Take a look at both sites and Dopplr imme­di­ately stands out as purer and more fluid in terms of design as Tripit. Make no mis­take, tripit is well designed as well, it just didn’t go as far as Dopplr in refin­ing the feel­ing the use of the ser­vice pro­vides to the users.
• What seems to be a bet­ter inser­tion in the “flow” as defined by Stowe Boyd: Dopplr embraces a lot of ope­ness fea­tures: it has a FB app of course, but also lets you dis­play a wid­get on your site or blog, etc.

What will be inter­est­ing is the future dynam­ics of this mar­ket. On one side, one player whose strongest asset is a unique fea­ture; on the other, a player who plays bet­ter on sev­eral next-gen CA. Note also that TripIt’s founders seem to come from the travel indus­try while the founders and man­agers at Dopplr are a much more diver­si­fied crowd of geeks and design­ers. So the DNAs should be very dif­fer­ent and what we’ll see might be the result of that.

How this will play will be shaped by the dynam­ics of the mar­ket too. Both play­ers need to attract users in order for them to be use­ful to trav­el­ers, and both play­ers need to mon­e­tize their user base.

A “pre­mium” fee charged for addi­tional fea­tures seems dif­fi­cult to imple­ment in this 2-players mar­ket. Mon­e­ti­za­tion via ads should also not be straight­for­ward, as trav­el­ers enter­ing their trips have likely made plans any­way and shift­ing them from exist­ing travel reser­va­tion sites will prove extremely dif­fi­cult. Even Esther Dyson rosy pic­ture, where one would “friend” an air­line and let it pro­pose spe­cial deals based on the travel plans, seems utterly opti­mistic. You don’t need to be a social net­work­ing site to imple­ment such a fea­ture, if this is suc­cess­ful on Dopplr, it first has to com­pete head-tohead with TripIt, and then with the likes of Orb­itz which will imple­ment these as well. (On Orb­itz, you would just “friend” (autho­rize) an air­line as well and accept that it pro­poses spe­cial deals when you search for your next ticket).

What does this leave in terms of com­pet­i­tive advan­tage ? We’ll explore this in part 2. Feel free to com­ment of course.