“Building to flip” is a term that means that you’d build a company, product, or service specifically with the intent to sell it. This strategy is not often the best strategy, since you remove customer from the equation and simply try to make the service attractive to prospective buyers. Good for you, bad for all of us. But is this always the case?
As of yesterday, we saw that Adaptive Path was able to sell one of its projects, Measure Map to Google. This wasn’t a straight sell of product for cash, since a few of the employees of Adaptive Path are going as well. However, this announcement brought out a lot of opinions. The opinions ranged from congratulatory to confusion, yet these were not based on the quality of the product itself, just the stage of development Measure Map was in when it was sold.
Measure Map is technically still in early development, so when it was purchased many started to wonder whether or not that was a good thing. Others thought that Google bought it because it was in “beta”. We all know Google love their betas.
I think there are two things being ignored here. The first being that Google stood to save a lot of money, and a lot of “redevelopment” time by purchasing Measure Map as soon as it crossed their desk. Once Measure Map was out in the open, making a profit, it would have been more expensive for Google to purchase it outright. Once Measure Map was out of beta stage, Google may have had to “reverse engineer” the work that had been done in order to use it for their purposes. Google, without seeing the end-product finished and out in the open, saw the value in Measure Map.
I’m not “in the know” so consider all of the above as pure speculation. However, when people say that building something to flip is totally and 100% the wrong way to do things, I think it depends on who your building to flip it to. Value is definitely in the eye of the beholder, and if the company/person buying your product, service, or company has any amount of creative thinking ability they will see the value, even if it is not completely finished yet.
Congratulations to Adaptive Path and Google.
About Colin D. Devroe
Has any thought been given that maybe Google didn’t want the specific code behind Measure Map but the people who were in charge of developing it? Maybe they also saw this as an easy way to take out a potential competitor to Analytics. I think there’s many positives to buying Measure Map, and as you said, especially when it’s in Beta.
So…either I’m missing something, or you’ve posted yet another[1] headline that sounds good and provocative yet doesn’t actually apply to the following content.
Is the implication here that Measuremap was built to be flipped? The headline would seem to be suggest this, yet you never actually apply the concept to Measuremap itself, opting instead to talk about it as a general practice, and then about why Google would want to buy the product, not why Adaptive Path would want to sell it. I don’t think I’ve encountered anything else hinting at this, either, and it frankly doesn’t sound like something Adaptive Path would do.
[1] This isn’t directed specifically at you so much as it’s a common and annoying trend in the *retch* blogosphere.
Acquiring those involved is definitely “icing on the cake” for Google. Google’s interfaces have been “bashed” many times over, and for good reason. Perhaps hiring some of the best in the business of making things usable and looking good is a step in the right direction.
Thought I doubt this was the sole motivation. Further, I doubt they saw Measure Map as a direct competitor to analytics. Sure MM would have stole some of GA’s blog thunder, but overall Analytics would be more driven towards businesses and those that are serious about their statistics.
Only the future will tell how they will end up using MM and its team.
I think the point being ventured here is that if you’re building a specific technology that’s new or unique, it might not be a bad thing to have a suitor in mind that can make use of that technology to fill a void or complement their existing offerings. This would apply to the team behind MeasureMap as well.
If you’re building something that is dependent upon community and user satisfaction as success measurements, you need to keep the users in mind and *then* worry about who might acquire it, not target suitors before you have a single signup or paying customer.