This article was published on December 17, 2010

The Importance of Being Prepared


The Importance of Being Prepared

Startups need to be flexible to confront the many different challenges along the road to success, any experienced entrepreneur will tell you that. However, one challenge you might not consider is overnight success.

When it was revealed that Yahoo planned to shut down social bookmarking tool Delicious, users rushed to find a replacement. It was a dream scenario for the other bookmarking services out there – their chief competitor killed off in a stroke. However, one of those competitors, the gorgeous-looking Zootool, wasn’t quite prepared enough it seems.

After a rush of traffic from people reading articles like our 6 Solid Alternatives to Delicious, Zootool is down and out. Visit the site now and you’ll be hit with nothing but a message saying: “The Delicious rumors hit us pretty hard. We are currently working on the import system and the whole infrastructure to be able to handle that better. Sorry for the downtime and thanks for your patience!

While it’s too soon to write off Zootool completely, the initial surge of interest in Delicious replacements is sure to wane soon and the service’s chance of capitalizing on that will be wasted.

The sad thing is that Zootool really could have got a huge boost in its audience out of this episode. As we described it: “A creative and awesome web application places an emphasis on saving visual content, so it’s pretty much like if FFFFound, Tumblr and Delicious had a baby.”

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What’s the lesson? If you’re not prepared for the unexpected, your big shot at getting the attention you need may be wasted.

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