STFU #10 — The Polyandrous Horseshoe Crabs — How Lazy Competitors wait for your ‘Eggs’

Along the East Coast in the US from New England all the way to Mexico are a special kind of ‘crabs’ called Horseshoe Crabs.

They are mostly known for their blue blood used in lab safety tests, including for COVID-19 vaccines. Physically, they are less of crabs and more of scorpions and Spiders, despite having “crab” in their names, and they don’t sting.

But when it comes to mating, they are real stingy ‘crawlers’.

The efforts sometimes begin underwater. A male yearning for fatherhood uses his boxing glove-like front legs to clasp onto a female’s abdomen and hitch a ride directly behind her through the surf. So situated, he stands ready to contribute sperm the moment she begins laying her eggs on the sand.

However, the story is different the moment the couple surfaces on the beach. There are a lot of other male crabs waiting for such a ‘nesting’ couple. They rush to seek the female crab out, somehow finding her more attractive than others, and hang around her, despite the original male already clinging on to her!

The moment the female releases her eggs, the attached mate deposits his sperm, but the others pounce and deposit theirs as well. That’s when Waiting-in-the-wings suddenly transforms into Polyandry!

In some lab tests, when the eggs went through a ‘paternity test’, it was found that while the original male crab got half the credit (51%), the ‘satellite’ males fertilized 40% of the eggs on average and 4% of the eggs that were laid by the female were fathered neither by the attached male nor by the satellite.

While he got the majority to himself, am sure you can feel the angst of the original ‘papa’ crab who took all the effort to get the ‘mummy’ up on the surface!

If you reflect carefully, it happens a lot with us in our personal lives. Whether it is in terms of relationships, class notes, projects, or critical summaries, most of us have had some occasions when we took all the effort, but when it was time for us to get credit for the output, someone else jumped right in and shared the credit with us. Or worse, when we piggybacked on someone else’s effort to snatch some credit away from them!

While connecting human angst with animal coitus might appear absurd, am hoping you get the point. The analogy, here, however, is more pertinent to the startup system, and not our personal regrets.

Polyandry in E-commerce for Brands

When you read this split of paternity share, and if you are a person who checks Amazon’s search term analyses, you would instantly be able to connect with this. It’s what we call in Amazon, for ‘search keywords’, brands getting a “conversion share” — literally, the crabs are being measured on that.

With lower entry barriers in digital businesses, almost a similar trend is catching on. Each brand keeps looking out for new products/categories to get into, in their quest to survive. If they find some male crab (brand) cling onto some keywords/product categories, they jump onto the opportunities and launch the categories. Building a brand has become less common compared to duplicating others’ categories and keywords. Innovation is getting outsourced to competition.

When you rank on a specific keyword, or launch a new product, there are competitors waiting to pounce on you — they just have to check if you are getting the output (eggs) — and then they jump right in with their…er…let’s call it ‘investments’!

Incidentally, a couple of weeks back, I had written another note on competition cutting you off as you rise ( STFU#08)- this is more about competitors assuming you are their ‘innovation engine’ in a way — where their pipelining is the one that you bring on the table. Maybe a copy of Adam Grant’s ‘Originals’ might inspire them!

At True Elements, till a few years back, we used to feel that we were the horseshoe crab that got the ‘right’ female crab from the sea, and as soon as we got her on the beach, the other lazy crabs were hanging around, waiting for pounce on her.

Be it the right keywords on Amazon, the specific SKUs for the category, or new categories to enter into. Even the certifications we had were a good reference to be copied. At one point in time, we thought that our New Product development team was literally working for 4 brands, and not just us!

But then we noticed another thing — we were also sometimes waiting at the beach, and checking out the other female crabs that our fellow male crabs were clinging onto. This new-age polyandry might sound weird to the older generation, but it did help us drive scale and co-exist in the crabby society!

“First mover advantage is a myth” — Mark Ritson emphasized this many times. But also that most of the ideas are not original — you just have to be smart and not always dumbly copy someone else.

All said and done, when you are a fetcher, you should know that there is no way that other satellite-rs won’t come. It is less likely that you can buzz them off or sit across and negotiate — no one bothers. They are also under pressure and just need to somehow get eggs (thanks to the ones who sponsor their ‘investments’).

But while being a satellite crab is a fact of life, we also need to jump inside the water sometime and find our lady swimming around. Just waiting on the beach is not good enough.

And if you are too small to satellite or fetch, don’t worry -there is the 4% contribution share of the eggs you get, which all others leave. Maybe you can start with that!

Stfu!

References: National Geographic, June 2022 issue, Research, Polyandry image

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.