Jack Ma is the founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. He was worried about eBay encroaching on his turf, so he created Taobao during SARS epidemic. The site developed a whole range of features that essentially build trust among near customers. That's much easier to do than learning customers from a big platform with network effects.
In an era driven by network effects, smaller players struggle to compete against bigger platforms. The trick to gaining ground on a much larger rival, says Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee, is choosing a strategy that can’t easily be imitated. A good example is TaoBao’s strategy for displacing eBay in China, back in 2007.