Eh, Amazon gets used a few times a month by a whole lot of people. Ebay definitely has addicts. AirBnB fits your theory better, but I think they managed to get noticed by being truly disruptive.
When you first hear about a travel planning site, it probably doesn't just happen to coincide with a time you're planning to travel, so best-case scenario is you bookmark it, which just goes into a giant list of bookmarks that you'll never look at again.
And when you need to plan a trip, you'll just go to expedia or hotwire or some other site that's gotten burned in your brain through advertising. Or you'll just google flights. Because that's the simplest thing to do and it comes up with pretty decent prices.
Airbnb from the beginning was an experience set apart. We stayed in Venice on my honeymoon and we had perfect local recommendations by a schoolteacher who lives there. We stayed at her house, and had breakfast with her every morning. It wasn't merely disruptive in the abstract sense. It is a better experience than being in cold tourist hotels.
>I think they managed to get noticed by being truly disruptive.
A company is not "truly disruptive" before it's disrupting something. I'll bet there are thousands of apps and services out there that have ideas that could potentially become disruptive if they gained traction. Many, maybe most of these will never go anywhere.
When you first hear about a travel planning site, it probably doesn't just happen to coincide with a time you're planning to travel, so best-case scenario is you bookmark it, which just goes into a giant list of bookmarks that you'll never look at again.
And when you need to plan a trip, you'll just go to expedia or hotwire or some other site that's gotten burned in your brain through advertising. Or you'll just google flights. Because that's the simplest thing to do and it comes up with pretty decent prices.