My point is:
Can you do it better than Google?
I think that in many cases the answer is...
Yes!
I got a lot of ideas from Katty Sierra's Creating Passionate Users.
(http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/)
This is a MUST read for me.
Good luck.
If you can do better than Google, could you market it better? It seems like the best way to compete with the big guys is to stay out of their way until you've built a solid base.
Most of the "marketing" is done by tech people blogging about the new product, and other tech people read it and thinks that everyone uses it.
I would think that Gmail is the perfect example of this. I read about it all the time, but that's because I read slashdot, digg, reddit and other sites that most people don't read.
Even people studying computer science don't know about Gmail and has to be told that there is an alternative mail service. I bet that most of Facebook's users don't use Gmail or don't see the point when they have Hotmail.
