A few months ago, I started building a product in the travel space — the core idea was to bring AI + Maps together to solve travel planning in a smarter way.
First thought that hit me:
Isn’t this exactly what Google could (or rather should) be doing?
They literally own Maps and Gemini. Why wouldn’t they just build it?
The answer, I’ve come to realise, lies in business dynamics — not capability.
Big companies like Google can build anything. But the real question is: does it move the needle?
You don’t see a whale hunting a few krill. It’s not worth the energy. A whale goes after tonnes of krill in one go — that’s when the energy spent actually pays off.
I believe it’s the same in business: you don’t invest massive resources into something unless the return is big enough. Google’s focus is on areas like Search, Ads, and Cloud — that’s where the bulk of their revenue and competition lies. Those are the high-stakes arenas they have to dominate, especially with AI shaking everything up.
So even though travel is a big market, it’s not big enough for Google to suddenly pivot and go all in. They might make some moves to taste it — solve for shallow use cases or grab quick wins, but it would not be a focused effort into achieving perfection within the sector.
I believe, perfection required deep work. Even with something like Travel where the personas are well known. There are multiple new technologies in the market, the market keeps developing new behaviours, new user personas are getting added — getting market validation, proving demand, finding a product market fit considering all the above scenarios requires deep work — deep enough that the effort starts growing exponentially the deeper you go.
So there comes a breaking point, companies with different core markets are only willing to go as deep in their side quests.
These breaking points of depth are a good leverage for startups working on shared but niche markets or solving specific use cases.
So to summarise, the factors to not being killed by a unicorn would be,
- Start by solving for a specific problem serving a niche market - as the startup gains more customers, it can expand
- Venture deep enough where unicorns would need massive investment to compete
- Find good unique selling propositions from the perspectives you gain from the depth