The Counterintuitive Way to Build a Small Business

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Taobao is one of many companies that have faced similar scenarios as Taobao was facing, or these sort of underdog firms. We still want people to buy the book by the way. Those are great examples. I'm wondering in the book, you must provide some other examples of companies that've faced similar situations. Are there anything you can share with us?

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.