Why are Internet products more and more difficult to do?

Recently, Andrew Chen, director of user growth of Uber, wrote on his personal blog that nowadays, mobile Internet products have become more and more difficult to achieve user growth because our current technology growth cycle is coming to an end. So, what's the inspiration for startups?

The trends to be discussed in this paper include:

Platform curing

Pay and receive channel is close to saturation

Advertisements are ignored

Advanced tools reduce operational barriers

Competitors become more agile

From fighting "boring time" to Google / Facebook

It seems that all of a sudden, entrepreneurs and investors have begun to enter into some new fields - genetics, vertical take-off and landing of flying cars, cryptocurrency, AI, Internet of things, etc., trying to find new opportunities. To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to recognize the trends mentioned above. After all, if you can't grow in your existing market, then you need to move quickly into new markets, as Mr. grad said:

At the end of a cycle, the technology market tends to be characterized by the rapid diversification of the types of start-ups that get financing. For example, after the explosion of mainstream Internet markets (Google, Yahoo, eBay, PayPal) in the late 1990s, there was a sudden trend of diversification in 2000-2001. People began to invest in P2P and mobile devices. Then in 2002 and 2003, people began to pay attention to clean technology, nanotechnology, etc. From the perspective of return on venture capital, these industries have finally failed.

Nanotechnology and clean technology belong to the last cycle. Now we are going to talk about the next cycle.

1、 Platform curing

Compared with web pages, Google / Apple's dual monopoly on applications is more centralized, more closed and less rich (from a growth perspective), which means that the mobile field is more difficult to enter. The function of the app store seems to be a leaderboard, which provides some required apps and recommends some selected apps, all of which promote the "winner takes all" feature of the mobile ecosystem.

It's no wonder that the rankings in the app store have become rigid over the years, and Facebook and Google now control multiple seats in the top 10 of the mobile ecosystem:

If you want to launch a new app, how do you deal with this situation?

With the decrease of growth opportunities, the channels of paying for customers have become saturated.