Ask HN: One of the YC Demo Day companies has built my idea, what should I do?

Are they hiring? Being the first employee at a company which is working on an idea you're excited about might be almost as good as being the founder.

After I started working on my idea, I found a firefox plugin with over 1 million downloads doing something extremely similar. And they had 12 guys with angel investment working on it too. Yesterday I found Google has a plugin to do it as well, with over 60k users who love it, and another startup apparently has 4.5 million downloads of their plugin, also in the same space (partially at least).

And yet, all it does is motivates me to "kick ass", as you put it so well. Let it motivate you as well. Having competitors:

1. Validates the market for you

2. Makes you work harder and faster than you otherwise might have

3. Let's you see where they went wrong and avoid their mistakes and do what they did right, but better

There is always room for a competitor. I think you should launch as soon as possible. Don't worry much about your competition. They already have edge on you but you can build a better product or carve some useful feature.

Good Luck!

It depends - are you sure this isn't a winner-take-all market and do you have something that gives you some unique advantage over them?

Perhaps you have unique insights into the market which they don't understand? (Eg, Foursquare vs Google Latitude)

Perhaps you have a launch strategy that gives you something better users (Eg, Facebook vs MySpace)

Perhaps you can do a better job (eg, Dropbox vs every other previous backup service, Google vs every previous search engine)

They have money, first mover advantage and the advantage of YC contacts. Are you advantages enough to win?

We've recently invested in 4-5 companies that are very similar to startups in this latest batch of YC companies...and it has happened before. Sometimes it makes me queasy, but I usually take it as a confirmation signal that there is a market opening. Competition should not discourage you unless you're in a tiny market. And there are very few 'tiny' markets.

Unless you have a more compelling idea, I would "stick it out and try to kick ass" ;-)

Best of luck to you.

Competition is indeed overrated. Everyone wants to be first/fastest/biggest, but quicker/cheaper/smarter competitors always pop up regardless of the industry you're in.

I've been waiting for a YC company to build a competing product to mine and I was delighted to hear about it this demo day.

I think it's time to keep calm and carry on.