Yesterday, I tweeted that
Pets.com is back! #fullcircle twitter.com/albertwenger/s…
— Albert Wenger (@albertwenger) May 8, 2012
with the following picture
and got quite a few replies and retweets. Some people saw it as a sign of a potential new bubble (or even the imminent collapse of the same) while others said they were happy users of the service.
Those different reactions reflect the importance of approaching a recurrence with an open mind:
Just because something has been tried before and failed (even failed spectacularly) doesn’t mean it won’t succeed at a later point.
If you are doing something that has been tried before and failed, you need to have a point of view about how what you are doing is different.
There are at least four possible sources of difference: different strategy, different execution, different design, different environment.
In the case of Wag.com there is a ton that’s different compared to Pets.com along all four of these categories. For instance, the site is part of Quidsi (diapers.com, etc) which in turn is part of Amazon! The total amount of ecommerce has skyrocketed since the days of pets.com.
With those differences there is a very good chance that Wag.com will work. So #fullcircle as my choice of hashtag was wrong as it implied that it is the same as before. I am “amending” my tweet to #thistimeitsdifferent.
