Dopplr and Tripit: next-gen strategies ? Part 1

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.

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