When Receivd, a new file-sharing service, launched a few days ago it was heralded as a "Dropbox killer."
It reminded me of when, in 2007, Drew Houston stormed onto the scene with his "GDrive killer," which was, of course, Dropbox.
The funny this is, four years have come and gone and there's still no GDrive. Meanwhile, Dropbox is killing it.
Recently a lot of actual competition has sprung up. Apple is going to launch a cloud storage product at WWDC in June. Amazon launched an offering just last week. A good friend of mine built a successful file sharing app called Crate. And who knows why Google hasn't launched a cloud storage locker yet. But this is four years later.
What's amazing to me is that in the spring of 2007 the GDrive really did seem immiment. I remember holding off on buying a hard-drive because I truly expected to be able to store my mp3's in the cloud "any day now."
Even Houston himself was worried about the looming threat of the GDrive.
But in the end, Houston just dove in and built something. Dropbox solved a pressing (and difficult) problem really, really well. And, as it turns out, four years ahead of everyone else.
The simple lesson here? Competition doesn't matter. Edit: As in, if the problem you're working on remains unsolved, it doesn't matter who else has tried or might try or is trying to solve it.
Solve a problem. Build something that people want. Make it good.
Focus on your product instead of looking over your shoulder at the competition.
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