Man, I am one of those unabashed assholes who thinks that he is super smart.  Luckily, most of my friends and staff around me humor me and allow me to live in my own Chris-centric universe.  Thankfully so.

Thanks, guys.

However, every couple months ago I get hit by an idea that somebody else has done/is doing, wince, and say “man, why didn’t I think of that!”

I wrote a post a couple weeks ago about Group-buying and how Vietnam is cloning a bunch of Groupon sites.  One of my colleagues told me once, “The beauty of working in emerging markets is that you don’t have to create a business model.  You can just take an old business model and figure out how to make it work in Vietnam.”  For the GroupOn clones, it has been largely about copying GroupOn (well duh).

Today in a post on Facebook by Minh Skydoor, he lists these clones:

• Groupon.vn
• Phagia.com.vn
• Muachung.vn
• Nhommua.vn
• Cungmua.vn
• Cucre.vn
• Kenhgia.vn
• Doimua.vn
• Livingsocial.vn
• Groupbuy.vn

Apologies to those clones that are missing from Minh’s list.

Copying someone else’s business model isn’t that smart.  Especially in the Internet Startup space.  Essentially, it is a race to see who gets the most mass quickest, and who can utilize that mass to push the competitors out of the market.  Certainly some startups have some advantages at the starting line (i.e. with lots of traffic, capital, sales force), however there are no inherent advantages in the business models.  Nothing differentiates them, which makes it impossible for them to have long-term competitive advantages.

GroupOn (the real McCoy) has realized this, and has created GroupOn stores.  What GroupOn now allows retailers to create their own group-buying deals without having to go through a GroupOn sales person.  GroupOn is now evolving beyond being social buying into a “self-serving deal platform”.  The GroupOn deal experience for retailers to date has been based around their sales force on the ground.  The number of deals (and consequently their revenues) have been capped by the number of deals their sales people can put into the system.

By automating the platform for retailers, they essentially remove the glass ceiling on their revenues.  At the same time, they are differentiating themselves clearly against their competitors by putting the power in the dealers hands.  For consumers, they will consolidate and expand on their leads to offer the most deals on the planet.

It is this “self-serving” paradigm that gave Google such a lead on the SME business space, over that of Microsoft and Yahoo.  To date, Microsoft and Yahoo are still trying to catch up.  Many doubt that they ever will.

I read this morning that AOL has started a Groupon Service called Wow.com.  Many big publishers jump into the Internet startup game. They normally wait until a business model has been proven (or at least made sexy) and then they jump in, hoping that their established audience base will allow them to pole vault past the bootstrapped startups who pioneered the model.

Companies that the publishers are trying to emulate include:

• Facebook – (Yahoo 360)
• FourSquare – (Facebook Places, Yahoo Koprol)
• Twitter – (Google Buzz, Yahoo Meme)

And now, GroupOn is the next on the list.  AOL has started their offering, but in Vietnam, most of the local major publishers have started their own (or in the process of) launching their own social buying services.

• PhaGia
• DoiMua
• NhomMua
• ChungMua

The challenge for publishers jumping into the Group Buying model is that the often do not have the correct sales people to negotiate the deals with the retailers.  They often try to get sales people who are comfortable and used to selling media.  The approach and the conversation with retailers is very different.  The limited success of these publishers can be seen from the quality of the deals.  Poor quality deals will inevitably lead to low adoption rates in the market.