I read this great Morgan Housel piece last week on ‘Sustainable Sources of Competitive Advantage‘. It begins with:
The key to business and investing success isn’t finding an advantage. It’s having a sustainable advantage. Something that others either can’t or aren’t willing to copy once your idea is exposed and patents expire.
Finding something others can’t do is nearly impossible. Intelligence is not a sustainable source of competitive advantage because the world is full of smart people, and a lot of what used to count as intelligence is now automated.
That leaves doing something others aren’t willing to do as the top source of sustainable competitive advantage.
From the beginning at Stocktwits, I have believed in the mission of building the best (vibrant, fun, informative, friendly) financial community. Our CEO, Ian Rosen believes the same. When we talk,the discussion always starts with the community.
I believe people can learn the language of the stock market very quickly using Stocktwits. I believe we have created a social ‘ticker’. Doing this, as our team has in a real-time world, is almost impossible. The markets are moody and people are moody. In real-time it is impossible to curate and remain completely open. We have ‘house rules’ which do NOT please everybody. Communities that grow organically, like we have, take a lot of time. They grow in spurts.
The election week was an event we could prepare for from a volume perspective.
This week though saw a crazy boom AND bust in shipping stocks. Maybe it was Steve Bannon’s comments on spending $1 trillion on infrastructure including shipyards, but traffic and messages surged. It was not something we foresaw or could have properly prepared for.
One Thursday, we had 10,000 messages on $DRYS alone. Four years ago, 10,000 messages was a good day for the whole site.
I was watching in awe from the streams as this unfolded. Wave after wave of messages moving from stock to stock in the shipping sector. Of course, with the surge we get flooded with a lot of real-time nonsense and spam. This is new users commenting and asking questions, people bragging about the money they made and people commenting about the crash that must be coming.
NO. LACK. OF. OPINIONS.
We have learned not to panic. We have seen countless waves and surges. We wait it out and let the markets do their thing and begin the stream clean up. The growth helps us figure out ways try to get smarter about curation (human and technology).
The community always panics. They should. They love the community. They are used to things being a certain way.
For all these reasons, communities are undervalued.
It is also why communication products/platforms raise so much money to go horizontal and not vertical.
It’s also likely a better time than ever to go vertical if you want to keep a competitive advantage.