I set out to build a reverse address book. Instead of updating your address book with changes from everyone else, you update your own details and it pushes to everyone else. Turns out someone beat me to it and my inspiration evaporated.
Zoom is a recent and great example of competing in a crowded market and winning. For you builders/founders out there, are you on a never ending quest to find something new/unique or do you prefer another quality in your idea to start a project?
You come up with a brilliant idea, you obsess over it, you Google some info, and on your screen lies your idea, being done by someone else, for the last two years. You’re all too familiar with that sinking feeling in your stomach that follows. You abandon the idea almost immediately after all that excitement and ideation.
First (as already mentioned), existing solutions prove your idea — their existence proves that you’re trying to solve a real problem that people might pay to have solved. And it proves that you’re heading in a direction that makes sense to others, too.
Second, and this is the biggie: The moment you see someone else’s solution, you mar and limit your ideas. It suddenly becomes a lot more difficult to think outside the box because before, you were exploring totally new territory. Your mind was pioneering in a frontier that had no paths. But now, you’ve seen someone else’s path. It becomes much harder to see any other potential paths. It becomes much harder to be freely creative.
Next time you come up with that great idea, don’t Google it for a week. Let your mind fester on the idea, allow it to grow like many branches from a trunk. Jot down all of the tangentially related but equally exciting ideas that inevitably follow. Allow your mind to take the idea far into new places. No, you won’t build 90% of them, but give yourself the time to enjoy exploring the idea totally.
When I do this, once I do Google for existing solutions, I usually find that all the other things I came up with in the ensuing week are far better than what’s already out there. I have more innovative ideas for where it could go next; I have a unique value proposition that the other folks haven’t figured out yet. But had I searched for them first, I never would have come up with those better ideas at all.
Finally, I’ll say this: if you see your idea has already been done and you no longer care about it, then it probably wasn’t something you were passionate enough about in the first place; it was just a neat idea to you.
That guy explained to me that quite the opposite, that forced us to "create" the market. A thing that is like exploring a jungle with a machete, whereas marketing an existing product is like driving on a toll road. To my surprise, he explained he preferred to have competitors: you know where the market is at, the typical pricing, there are events for your field, you know the essential features, you can compete on prices and plans, users are talking about the products, know how they can use it.
We, often, met clients who had no idea what our products could achieve for them, how to use them, how to integrate it into your processes. I have learned that there is nothing more dangerous than depending on your clients having imagination for a sale. You need to spoonfeed applications.
There's really a second/third/fourth mover advantage that often isn't talked about, which is that you don't have to explain the entire point of your product before convincing them that your pricing makes sense and it's worth their time. When clear competitors exist, the sale is just why your specific solution is superior (more efficient, smarter features tacked on, cheaper pricing etc.)
Indeed.
That's the underlying reason for the hoary old truism that "the pioneers get all the arrows". In terms of business, you really don't want to be first to market. You want to be second or third, so you can learn from all the first's mistakes, and benefit from the market-building that the pioneers engaged in.
I've have been on the exact journey you described - the idea that won't leave me alone (probably 6 years old now), Googled early on to see if anyone else had built it yet; found two existing companies pursuing the same thing, but in two different ways that don't quite match my own.
I've been sitting on the idea for the last two or three years (it still won't leave me alone), and it has now evolved significantly. Fortunately, due to a rare moment of foresight, I've been keeping a journal capturing thoughts around the idea as I've had them, so I've now got a really nice record of the original concept, iterations, evolutions and adjacencies. The best part though, is that I have a record of the excitement that this idea gives me (re-kindled every time I read it), which is a great pick-me-up when the self-doubt takes hold.
I am now entering my last months of employment as I ready myself to jump in and make it real!
There are far more potential customers that haven't heard from either of you yet. So your next order of battle then becomes to try to contact as many of those potential customers ahead of any of your - would be - competitors.
Competition is healthy it keeps you sharp, but don't bother mapping it until you've established your position well enough that you are actually in competition, until that time it is usually a waste of time.
On the other side of all this: if you have heard of a particular company that executes on an idea you have had as well then unless you are willing to eventually go head-to-head with that company you may as well leave it alone. Chances are they are so far ahead on the 'mindshare' metric that a head-to-head battle will be extremely costly leaving you with a much diluted share in your own venture once all is said and done. If you're comfortable with that go ahead but if I were in the position of a founder I'd prefer a start-up where the founders had majority control until at least well past series 'A'.
This assumes that you can do meaningful research without ever Googling the problem space, which is virtually the same as finding competitors. And if you don't research at all while conceiving it, how exactly would you hear about competitors?
> don't bother mapping it until you've established your position well enough that you are actually in competition, until that time it is usually a waste of time.
Trying to open, say, a grocery store without the knowledge of a Walmart down the street sounds like the definition of wasted time.
However additionally I would add that if you think that it is the software alone that will make or break the company, then it is obvious that this is your first time doing this and that you have never brought a product to market. There are a ton of examples where one product that was of less quality absolutely annihilated another excellent product where the difference was the rest of the "business" machinery (marketing, sales, support, operations, etc).
It is an unpopular opinion in HNs, but good software is not enough to win.
This might give the idea that good software is necessary [1] to win, but history has proven this is not always the case.
But presumably if you combine it with the other stuff then it helps?
This can be generalized: a good product is not sufficient. To succeed in the market requires a lot of things, a good product being only one of them.
So many business owners fail to understand this. We have a better product, better support, we're made in America....
None of that matters. How do you present the product? What image does it portray? How is your name viewed?
I can only confirm this works. Sort of.
In 2014-2015 I had an idea for a roguelike beat'em up game. Something like adding roguelike mechanics to Castle Crashers. I did google it, but there were no games like that on the market at the time, so I developed everything from scratch.
While developing I never checked Google again. And when I released the first version into Early Access in late 2016, I noticed that there are now two games in the same sub-genre that came out in the meantime. Apparently those were in development long before mine, but the developers didn't bother to tell anyone about it and they just hit the market (i.e. Steam release) one day.
Now, one of the games had a lot of ideas that I came up by myself. One of those was a magic potion called "Crank" based on the movie of same name. You have to keep moving and kill enemies or your health goes down. Exactly the same idea with the same name for the potion. I removed this feature from my game, because this other game was already out and I didn't want to be called a copycat.
But beside those few similar ideas, the rest of the development went completely separate ways. The other two games were mostly linear, mine has procedurally generated mazes to explore. The other two games allow you to carry and use one weapon, mine allows multiple. The other two games have a fixed boss at the end of each level, mine randomly picks one of 24 bosses, etc, etc.
In the end, I have built a successful product that is different enough to cater to slightly different market segment.
Had those two other games been on the market already when I started, I would have probably given up at the very start.
P.S. Sorry if my English isn't top-notch, I'm not a native speaker.
I recently bought a Sony Voice Recorder just for talking about the wild ideas. Its amazing how much I was self-editing when jotting notes. Training yourself just to blather into a recorder (I don't use my phone because it felt weird) and then using some text to speech to extract the words later has really been a better workflow for me to get the fleeting thoughts out of my poor memory and into something I can continue to churn.
Having passion for your idea is quite understated. Passion is what pulls you through the tough times and helps truly unlock the magic in your solution. It's because you care about solving the problem that gives you the competitive advantage.
In my early days, I only spent about 3-6 months on an idea trying to validate it, hitting a roadblock and feeling deflated. With my current product, the idea has been worked on, thought about, validated and iterated for close to 6 months. Long time in the startup world but it's important for me to truly understand what the market is looking for before diving straight into sales. This turned out to be quite important as potential enterprise customers to make sure our solution resonates.
We're now looking to land demos and hopefully close some early sales and then look to raise seed funding once things have been derisked.
Your point of view is unique, by definition. Your idiocyncratic view, priorities and approach can have niche appeal or be better outright.
So true that your unique view can evaporate and recrystallize into the incumbent's way.
Search was old before google.
No, you don't know what ideas the existing company had (that were simply not implemented yet). Perhaps they had brainstorm sessions too.
Also, what prevents them from copying your ideas?
I don't want to sound like a downer, but there is simply no denying that they are one step ahead of you. They already have a working implementation of your main idea. You can still beat them, but it is like being behind 0-1 before the start of the match.
Of course they did. All I'm saying is that by giving yourself the opportunity to explore your ideas in a green field, having not seen others' implementations, you give yourself the opportunity to extend your idea into new directions that others may not be exploring yet (maybe they didn't think of it, or maybe they aren't attacking that direction, or maybe they want to but they just haven't gotten there yet).
> Also, what prevents them from copying your ideas?
Nothing. But also, nothing really prevents anyone from copying any of your ideas, whether or not similar solutions exist.
> they are one step ahead of you
At their game, yeah. In my experience, if I give it a week, I end up exploring a pretty different game anyway (different niche or audience, different way to solve it, etc.). They'd only be one step ahead of my game if they decided to pivot away from theirs and into my direction.
While it is harder marketing something that has no existing solutions like it, we've found that it's definitely not impossible.
* Ask yourself what would kill the idea, or the category it's in. Sometimes this leads us to come up with entirely new, even better ideas. Often it leads us to come up with a few better pieces to your original idea.
* Ask yourself what the simplest solution would look like for the user in an ideal world, then what the best technical solution would look like under the hood in an ideal world, then how you can marry the two in this world.
* Workshopping the idea with others can lead to totally new developments on the idea as you understand the problem you're solving better, what people think their solution would be, what people think of your solution, etc.
Thanks for sharing, it will help me in a current idea I have.
But then I realized, if my town can have 3-4 Chinese restaurants with the same exact menus (probably supplied by the same exact distributors), and they've all operated continuously for over a decade....who cares about uniqueness? Sure, none of these copycat places are raking in millions, but it's enough to support the livelihoods of the owner and all of his/her employees, so who cares? Your business doesn't need to be a unicorn to make you happy, as long as you're happy with that outcome.
Of course, tech does not operate the same way as Chinese restaurants, and for that I point you to Accumulative Advantage:
>Accumulative Advantage is when a small advantage at the beginning of something, such as kindergarten, becomes a little difference that leads to an opportunity that makes a bigger difference a bit bigger, and that edge in turns leads to another opportunity, which makes that initial small difference even bigger.
Put in context: You don't have to follow the same path your competitors did. Uber/Lyft poured billions into normalizing the concept of being driven by some stranger who uses the same app as you, so any new ride-sharing platform can spend that money in other areas. Giants like Microsoft have decades of technical debt they need to tackle; you can start building with 2019 libraries, 2019 paradigms (wouldn't the cloud have been great for startups ten years ago?) and 2019 performance.
In order for the underdog to win, there first has to be an underdog. If you're brave enough to start, you may just be brave enough to win.
[1] https://educationinnovation.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/12/is... (yeah, weird source, but I'm just trying to define the phrase)
However, that same $1M/yr is enough to sustain a bootstrapped business and even possibly build the credibility to raise a larger round and try to win the space.
If a company is already solving a problem, a better question to ask is "why didn't I know they exist?" It may be that they aren't properly tailoring their marketing to the target audience, in which case you have a clear opening.
As a "personal anecdote", we (https://sheetjs.com/) offer a variety of solutions for problems involving structured data. Before we started, there were plenty of solutions but every solution had various compatibility issues or didn't work with our data. Even in 2019 companies turn to us because of compatibility issues with Google Sheets or Excel 2019. We went through the same analysis and concluded that neither company thinks there will be a meaningful improvement in revenue or marketshare
I'll take this opportunity to tell a long-winded story about how that number can be two orders of magnitude larger, and still be too small.
I was with Slide when Google bought us in 2010. They bungled the acquisition (bought us to work on Google+, which had already made a bunch of disagreeable decisions by the time we were ready to rumble), so we were left to our own devices for a year, in which time about 12 of us made something called Photovine, a photo sharing app that would have competed with Instagram, and we were getting pretty universally positive press. I think TechCrunch called it the best mobile app google had ever produced, and all of our beta and early release engagement numbers were bananas.
(We also had loads of fun with it — the core sharing mechanic was organized around shared captions that we called vines, and we spent most of our play-testing time swapping visual puns.)
Anyway, if you project our trajectory generously, which didn't seem out of the question given our early traction, we would have wound up competing with Insta, doing business in the hundreds of millions. But Larry, in all his "more wood behind fewer arrows" wisdom, decided to axe the project, as he did many, many others, and re-assign all of us to YouTube, which, granted, was gearing up to compete with TV, and needed more staff.
And often, $1M/yr is not even needed. Many developers don't necessarily want to become managers and worry about funding rounds, hiring, etc. $1M/yr is already a pretty good lifestyle, no need to get further funding or scale the business if you're happy running the project on your own.
Competition isn't bad - that just means there's a market large enough for different companies to want to fight for a share of.
Then you would start a marketing company. Or it will become a fight about who spends the most on marketing, and the only winner would be the marketing companies.
That's not to say that you cannot be successfull running a small service, but it needs to be differentiated in some way and not just copy the existing ones (which works fine for a chinese restaurant if there isn't one in that part of the town).
The food is almost identical, the prices too, they are of course at a fixed location (but not quite sure how that makes any difference) and there are no seat constraints. Yet these places seem to stay alive even though none of them really offer anything different to the chicken shop next door.
I think these are very cool examples on how two seemingly the same thing end up diverging and finding up their own path.
https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/why-i-left-google-to-join-gr...
Doesn’t matter, they don’t need to dominate, just stake out a niche and distinguish themselves from the dominant player.
We're faster, simpler, privacy friendly, cheaper, etc.
Most leading SaaS businesses have proven there's a market, but they're vulnerable on one of those key differentiators.
Sure, you might not conquer the market, but it's probably a safer way to build a lifestyle business than trying to come up with and market a novel idea.
Much easier to find forums of people complaining about product X not doing Y and fill that gap.
There is a net demand for Chinese food in the area, and there will definitely be such a thing as 'too much or little' supply (though obviously each offer i.e. supply is a little different)
A single restaurant will only be able to meet so much demand, so if there's a niche in terms of region or menu, maybe there's a real opportunity.
GitHub, Uber, FB - they all have network externalizations to some extent, there definitely have economies of scale, and they are playing in a global marketplace (or at least, say 'the Western world').
So, no, it's probably not a good idea to compete directly with them.
In fact, incumbents almost always win - the idea is to do something different enough, solve a problem in a different way.
Slack did not build 'better email' they went up one level and built 'better communication'. And a whole bunch of other things of course. But 'slack e-mail' probably would not have yielded them the same result.
One thing that the losers have in common is that their execution was not good enough (or outright bad in the case of ExpertsExchange).
But Altavista was huge when Google started. AOL had network effects that did not help them, so it is absolutely not clear that it is impossible.
People however are more lethargic and programmed by their mobile devices these days, so it may be more difficult now.
If instead you want to have some fun and maybe get more money back than you put in, that's a different world.
I'm increasingly persuaded that unless you go to dinner parties with say Sequoia capital people, it's better to start small, get the principles working right and then build on it.
This is kind of amusing given that most new modern things in the hacker news ecosystem use either electron or some other variation of nodejs. Which is usually the exact opposite of 'performant'.
I also agree that not starting a project if it doesn't have unicorn potential is ridiculous, but I don't feel like there is anything to explain there.
You can franchise, but the expansion is very different to what software can do.
That said, there are so many things that can be done better than the standard software, or where different varieties can work better for specific cases.
That being said, I agree with the point of your comment in general, and we shouldn't stop ourselves from creating something we value just because it exists already. Working on something we care about gives meaning to our life, and who knows, maybe your solution will turn out to be the best one out there.
I love this quote. Thank you. Gonna ponder about this for the rest of my day.
An example closer to me: the search engine market is dominated by Elasticsearch, which is open source, extremely popular and is now even a public company. However, I decided to work on a small project called Typesense (https://github.com/typesense/typesense) to try and carve out a niche (and perhaps charge for it later).
I decided to take a dive simply because of the size of the market -- search is required in almost every SaaS application, and there are plenty of downsides to ES that can be addressed with a nimble, alternative search engine. And that's what I am doing :)
Python Port: https://lucene.apache.org/pylucene/index.html
.NET Port: https://lucenenet.apache.org/
Eventually, there will be certain premium features that maybe only 10% of people will really want, and I will charge for that. Playing the long game here.
I don't think there's anything wrong with this per se, but you still need something to set yours apart. For example, if the features are identical, then the price can be different. If the price is the same, then you can edge them out with features or service or get ready, experience.
Amazon won us over with price, but now there are often other places with lower online prices (often walmart.com) but we tend to use amazon more because the experience is good (although they're killing that now too, but that's another discussion).
Just a reminder that pricing "cheaper" isn't always a good idea. Newbies often think they'll charge less, but without having the data competitors have of how long the product takes to develop & maintain, how much support is involved, how much advertising costs to acquire a customer, how often you need to upgrade your equipment etc.
Please make sure that your competitive advantage is not "selling at a price you can't possibly make a living from".
(Hint: being found first can also be an advantage. Even if you're not better or cheaper than the competition, if they try you first and think "meh, good enough, I can afford that", that can still get you the sale. Not everyone exhaustively researches the competing products.)
But somehow with the products I work on, being seen as a knockoff is constantly on my mind.
On his book "From 0 to 1", Peter Thiel goes even more extreme. For him, if something isn't 10x better then the alternative solution, he wouldn't do it.
Of course, all the above doesn't apply if your goal of building it is for learning-purposes or just for fun.
That rumbling dark cloud of well-funded, well-established competitors on the horizon, and (perhaps my mistaken) belief that I see gaps of sunshine where I can succeed, is one reason I get out of bed every morning and persevere.
That, and my wife needs the product. https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/
(forgive the Always Be Selling, please!)
It was common sentiment when I went through YC that many excellent ideas would be dismissed by investors due to perceived existing competition or absence of market. Only rapid execution, iteration, and customer feedback can actually determine if the idea has legs and can find product market fit.
I think I get it from the post, but seeing it would be so much more helpful.
If you feel like the problem exists, start building. But, if you think the problem is solved, then it makes no sense to proceed with it.
For a startup, people use your product because they have a problem to solve. It does not matter how bad your UI/UX is, how drastically bad your flows are, if you are offering a solution no one else is, you will have users. It just needs to work. The more pertinent the problem, more the users will be annoyed if it does not work. Ideally, your idea should be one of the solutions to the problem, and the entire initial phase is there to establish two things: 1/ Whether your solution works? Can you find a unique solution for the problem? 2/ Do a lot of people really have that problem?
For example: If you want to get into ridesharing and taxi market today, it will be difficult. But there is an open case where the wait times and variability annoys a lot of people. That is, if I am taking an Uber, I dont know how long will I need to wait. The app says 5 mins, but can be anywhere between 5-15 depending on the match. Sometimes, I have waited for >10 min and the driver cancelled and had to wait another 15. If some app can tell me exact time - or even let me schedule a ride - I would be happy to pay extra for that given it saves me the time and frustration. Not sure how many will have the problem, or it is good enough for others, but I will prefer a cab which allows me exactly this - even at a higher price point.
Maybe Zoom is a good example. For remote meetings, I was using Skype, Google Hangouts, and other video chat software. I kept having problems (especially on Linux). Products existed, but the problem wasn't solved. For me, Zoom solved the problem.
I have primarily used Linux for 25 years. In recent years the only other program I had trouble with was that the Unity IDE would run on Ubuntu, but to compile and export a VR scene, I needed to use a Mac.
Noting the OP - I created a thesaurus site a few years ago - https://www.matchingwords.com . I tried to pay for Google Ads for it, but they said the site was "not unique enough" and refused my money. Well there was an aspect of the site that was somewhat unique, although not completely unique - I had integrated hunspell into the site, so not only would a word like "laugh" yield a result, so would "laughs" and "laughed". That still was not enough for them though.
Tangentially, the thesaurus backend work was something another project had needed and was done before the web site was put up. With that backend work done, I thought it would be easy to just put up a website so that the backend work could be used twice, so I put up the website.
It's funny because I came to the same conclusion years ago, but had not written it until yesterday in a different context:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19770812
Great minds think alike :)
Source: We sign up people because, and these are quotes from sales calls, "You have a good font size, easy to read", "I won't have to train new staff on how to use this correctly".
The reason I am not going to stop working on it is:
- I am learning a lot while developing the new features(using lots of different tech that I don't necessarily use in my day job)
- it allows me to channel some creativity that I did not know I had
- it doesn't cost me anything to run
- even if it fails I can always use it as a showcase of my skills if I decide to start job hunting.
At the moment my goal is to get 10 users. When I get there, I'll re-evaluate how far I want to take it with this thing.
Fast forward 6 years and I come to this realization that the label printer software landscape hasn’t changed much at all. I start poking around Electron/React and native node modules for USB, fonts, barcodes and ... a year later this app is born: http://label.live
The problem is, it’s really difficult to market. 95% of my users come from organic App Store search...
My competition is either the free software that comes with the printer or very complicated and expensive Windows software.
Yep, it already exists... but no one seems to be doing the “any desktop computer, any label printer” solution.
It’s been a fun ride so far.
"The culture of Googling everything is diminishing innovation and critical thinking."
Person A: "I have this great Idea!" Person B: "What is it?" Person A: "Well its ______ for ______!. Isn't that awesome" Person B: (Quickly googles on his phone) "There are already X companies doing exactly that" Person A: "Ohhh..."(Drops his head in shame and moves on"
The most innovative ideas were mostly created by multiple people independently and not knowingly.
Do the lowered barriers to knowledge reduce our ability for critical thinking? How can we maximize the inherent benefits of the web; while minimizing these negative 2nd order effects?
The flip side of that is as soon as I figured something out I moved on, which lead to many half baked projects that I never got to completion. Once I figured out how something worked or how to solve a problem I lost interest in the idea almost completely and moved onto the next thing.
I still haven't completely figured out how to frame thing in a way to avoid this. The best way I know how to do it is to over shoot the idea most of the time. The issue is this doesn't work very well when working within a team.
The weird thing is that I often do find people working on similar things. Sometimes they're historical projects I'll find a Wikipedia article on, or sometimes they're posted here on HackerNews.
Every time I see one, I think, "Wow! That's a lot like what I'm doing! How is this not a bigger thing?!". The initial surprise used to last a while as I started to dig, but further explanation tended to reveal that things weren't as they appeared.
For an analogy, say that everyone's still using horse-drawn carriages, not cars, to get around. Then, you want to invent a car. Then, you see what looks a lot like a car in someone's lab or in a museum. Then it's like, woah!, right? I mean, if someone already made a car, why are people still using horse-drawn carriages?
So then I'd look into the car and see that it doesn't actually have an engine inside. Or maybe it's got like a major piece of an engine, but still 80% missing.
Anyway, back to the thread's topic...
If you're building something that already exists, how sure are you that the thing that you think is a preexisting implementation actually does what you want your thing to do?
And maybe it does, and maybe your thing's a replication effort. But, my experience has been that things that look the same are off. That I'd see something that I'd think to be a car, and then mistakenly assume that surely it must contain an engine, only to later find out it doesn't.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to achieve, but to me, this sounds prohibitively difficult for even the largest most sophisticated organizations at this point in history. It's just way too general. Like general AI kind of general.
I want to build the same thing. It seems hard so i haven't started working on it.
I enjoyed programming it as a learning experience and to scratch my own itch. But I eventually decided it would actually be harder to maintain the system than to write a dumb little web app for any given project. And that there were probably much more valuable things I could teach myself than My Excentric Web Framework.
On another front, while I have never written any code for it, I keep thinking it would be cool to have GeoCities back but updated for all the cool stupid things you can do in the modern Web. A place for your weird taste in CSS, in public, with no shame and open to all. But I keep wishing somebody else would do it, which is not exactly the thing you asked about but somewhat close.
Sounds like Neocities
Seeing how successful they are, it seems the "uniqueness of a product/service idea" is not such an important factor as it's commonly considered. Perhaps it's more about the execution, how the idea is implemented - UX, marketing, etc.
So, instead of continuing with job aggregator - I decided to build a job board (postjobfree.com)
My job board grew OK, because indeed.com and simplyhired.com sent us organic (free) traffic for couple of years.
But then (~2009) Indeed and Simplyhired started to charge job boards money for the traffic, and then refused to send even paid traffic to job boards (~2012).
In addition to that, Japanese "Recruit" holding bought Indeed in 2012 (for $1.2B).
Then "Recruit" bought Simplyhired (2016).
Then "Recruit" bought Glassdoor in 2018 (for another $1.2B). Glassdoor worked as a job aggregator as well.
So now largest job aggregator companies convert from "job aggregator" model to "job board" model where customers are direct employers and not other job boards.
So few years ago I started to transform my job board business into job aggregator again. I think if I never abandoned job aggregator idea in the first place, my business, probably, would be a little bit more successful by now. However it is hard to tell for sure. I could have given up competing against Indeed and SimplyHired back in 2007-2012.
I agonized over so many competitors, and none of them mattered. If you're going to do it, just do it.
Also is it still the same thing that you envisioned when you first stared?
I think the idea of a reverse address book could be generalized across many contexts. Tim Bernes-Lee is laying tracks for a protocol with that in mind, but it needs apps, especially ones that reach into where people store data today and migrate it to a network where people can subscribe to others data and publish their own.
Meet me where I’m at: on an iPhone, with its contacts system and cloud. Give me shared data without making me relearn contact management over again. Make it so I can show my mom how to do it in a minute, or better yet so easy she doesn’t need to ask about it. Don’t wait for big tech to deliver this. Prove it’s possible.
The idea sounds promising.
This is just wrong. None of the examples you mention are clones.
“Pioneers get arrows. Settlers take the land.”
Basically represents that being first to market is not ideal. Out execute when the market is proven.
Facebook's was a social graph. Google's were big analytics. Uber's a new terrible business model. Microsoft's was coopting so many good ideas to build a software ecosystem. Apple was the same with hardware.
And sometimes the space is just free for the taking, given strong enough budget. That's how DTP and CAD, electronics design and 3D graphics were almost duopolized. (And by better part libraries.)
Sound and video editing are a bit more competitive, but not a lot.
I realize now I approached the whole enterprise bass-ackwards.
Next time: find customers first, then build the thing. If you can't find customers, then at least you haven't wasted time and energy building the thing.
I know this is common wisdom now, but I apparently enjoy learning all of life's little lessons the hard way.
I still want to build the prototype. But, in trying to be realistic, I don't think it'll become a business or even popular.
This [0] kickstarter is trying to do a paid network, but I think they’ve over complicated it.
[0]https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/factr/factr-the-ethical...
It's quite established how to answer this question. More specifically, it's a classic strategy question (with a lot of marketing in it). You should look up what broad theory is applicable. My take (have an MBA or equivalent) is to look at differentiation, segmentation, resource based strategy, feedback loops and platform theory, Porter's five forces with critique, a static VS a dynamic perspective.
If you can find a viable (hopefully quite sustainable) strategy, go for it. If you can't, then don't.
Linus Torvalds recently did an interview [0], where he talked about, amongst other things, just how hard it is to get an OS off the ground.
Excerpt: “I used to think that some radical new and exciting OS would come around and supplant Linux some day (hey, back in 1994 I probably still thought that maybe Hurd would do it!), but it's not just that we've been doing this for a long time and are still doing very well, I've also come to realize that making a new operating system is just way harder than I ever thought. It really takes a lot of effort by a lot of people, and the strength of Linux—and open source in general, of course—is very much that you can build on top of the effort of all those other people.
So unless there is some absolutely enormous shift in the computing landscape, I think Linux will be doing quite well another quarter century from now.”
0: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/25-years-later-intervie...
Let's go back in time 20-25 years. I was a wannabe game programmer, and every few months I'd get a stick up my ass to write a Doom clone, RTS, or whatever game I was playing at the time. I'd recruit a buddy or two from a chat room or messageboard. Even though whatever game was out there (Quake II, AoE) was amazing and something we'd never come close to, we'd start methodically planning out the game, star writing an engine, have some test art created...you couldn't stop us. At least not at the start. Eventually we'd get distracted and go our seperate ways, but we still worked on the project like it was the most important thing in our lives for 2-3 months.
Back to today. I wanted to make a chess website, just something simple where you could login and play a game with other users. Mostly so my dad and I could play without being in the same room. I wrote a simple web-based chess engine, got about 75% of the way to what I would consider a 'completed' project. Then I went to chess.com.
Now, I wasn't planning on making something even close to that. No chat rooms, blogs, rankings...but seeing all the features on the site just sucked every last drop of motiviation I had. It didn't help that my current site was basically playable and didn't need much more work. But from that point one, every time I opened my project it just felt so futile.
I know that products evolve over time, and whatever Chess.com looked like in it's first revision probably wasn't anything special. But it's like I knew that I would never even want to take it to that level, so I just lost every drop of motiviation I had at that point.
Professionally, I'll write only the code that I feel comfortable that I understand and can maintain. Otherwise, I'll look to third party open source code. Unfortunately, I have been bitten a few times recently by popular and well-maintained but poorly designed or tested libraries that include frustrating bugs.
In my personal projects, I like to challenge myself. I will choose to write any and all code that isn't provided by the language's standard library even if trustworthy open source libraries exist that I would use in a professional situation. I like to think of it as "desert island programming". If nothing else, it has taught me interesting things about all sorts of domains I wouldn't have otherwise sought to learn about. And that knowledge is worth the struggle when making it to market as fast as possible isn't the goal.
There are other reasons for reinventing the wheel besides supplementing your personal understanding. Sometimes the licenses of the alternatives are inadequate. Of course, that's a somewhat personal assessment. Sometimes the alternatives are poorly maintained, poorly designed, or have fundamental flaws or bugs. Sometimes it's not that the existing software is bad per se. Oftentimes writing software involves trade-offs and perhaps the trade-offs the major library's authors have chosen are different from what you might choose. Recreating it yourself can clue you in to these trade-offs and gives you the opportunity to explore different paths.
Both have good reason for building something even though a similar product might exist. Mark Zuckerberg didn't look at MySpace and say "Oh well, there's already a social network where people can connect with each other. I'll stay in Harvard". He saw MySpace and said "I can do better".
For the learning side, it's useful to build something despite its existence for gaining a greater appreciation for how that tool works. There's a service I've used before called Cloud66, which is essentially a wrapper for cloud services like AWS. I liked it so much I decided to build a clone just to see how it all works under the hood, and after replicating it I realised the underlying technologies used to achieve this are pretty simple. There's always good outcomes from building something, whether that be money, learning or just the joy of building something from nothing
I tell them to take a look at the rice isle in the supermarket and ask themselves "why are there so many varieties of rice?"... it's rice for goodness sake! How can one be different to another?
How can there possibly be a need for hundreds of different types of rice.
Even if you just pick one type, like white rice, there are multiple brands competing with something as simple as rice.
Every item on a supermarket shelf has earned the right to be there because people are buying it for different reasons.
Everyone is different: Some people only buy Uncle Ben's rice at 4 times the price of the supermarket rice and others only touch the unbranded value rice.
It's all marketing.
So if your idea already exists then it means there is probably a demand and you just need to find your angle and market it appropriately.
Currently I am building a simplified windows deployment system (fdeploy.com) which already exists but is no longer available freely. I want to change that.
My advice is: yes, do it. Give it a try, with most essential features and do not get lost in the details.
Deliver something and see if people want it. Anything. The sooner the better.
The hardest way to succeed it to create a brand new product no one has seen since you have to not only find the market you are selling to but convince them that they need the product plus teach that market how to use the product. Something that's expensive and time-consuming. So in a way having a product in the market is an advantage to someone that wants to compete in that area.
After the initial negative response I started to carefully examine my competitor's solution, and the more I look at it, the more I'm convinsed that our system will outperform it big time. They apparently have technical problems which has stopped them from capturing market shares in the past 6 months.
If I would have found out about this other company 6 months ago, I would have never started working on the project. Thank god I did though. I have learned so much about web and app development, I have expanded the idea of what I'm capable of, I'm about to found a company (which of course anyone can do but feels super exiting for me :D ) and I actually have a shot at making it fly.
It is always better to do something than nothing.
- Perhaps the service isn't able to meet 100% of the user needs, maybe because some users jumped onto that product because it was the closest (but not perfect) solution to their problem. Or maybe the company grew too big and lost focus/decided to ignore the needs of a few because they moved up.
- What about the non-technical parts of the product/service? Sometimes you can differentiate by user experience (the note-taking app "Notion" is a really good example of this, and totally swept me up. Kudos to their team!).
Now, unless you're shooting for the unicorn status, there's a pretty good chance you can build a good product, compete and get enough customers to make a living. You don't have to be the best or the cheapest to compete and you don't need hundreds of thousands of customers to make a living.
In the end, i think it really depends on what you're trying to achieve: unicorn status or small side project that you'll enjoy working on and might someday become a full time job.
Either way you should try to do what you love, or if that's not an option, to learn to love what you do. That way, even if you don't succeed, your time won't be wasted and will be spent doing something you love.
You can do the latter in a crowded market as you said, but often if you think you would like to build something for yourself, which is often the best way to build a product, then it's certainly possible to be satisfied with something that already exists.
Here's Overcast with Clip Sharing[0]
If the answer's yes, you probably should stop. Because at best, you'd make the same product. If not, see where the product fails and try and estimate what could be better and is it worth it.
Last, remember that the later you are on the market, the more expensive it gets to get attention. You'll either need cash or need to seek funding.
I think my current idea (a new IDE) has potential to be very important, and I think I’m going to do 2 or 3 key things better than my competitors, so I just have to do it :) It doesn’t matter who else is doing it.
I take on projects (both commercial and hobby) that satisfy a need that isn't already being adequately addressed elsewhere.
I don't care much if a product of the same sort already exists. I only care that it isn't adequately meeting a need.
In fact, if I've come up with an idea and find that nothing like it already exists, I consider that a red flag. Not a showstopper, but a reason to be much more cautious. This is because it often happens that if nobody else is addressing a given market, it's because there's some serious problem in addressing that market that I haven't foreseen (perhaps it isn't as big as I think, or there is some technical gotcha that I didn't notice, etc.)
Overall: Look at all these products that have nearly identical features (with only some distinction).
The key is to think about the features that would make your product unique and to analyze whether there is people who will prefer your product (at your price point) to all the other options.
I'd love to bring something innovative to the market but it really isn't necessary. A lot of people focus on things that a lot of other people don't care about or like. So it's easy to get a decent market share with basically already existing products that just provide some "buy-worthy" features.
Of course competition can be harder here but on the other hand you don't have to put that much effort into building something completely new (which will give others the opportunity to improve upon your great idea).
It's also easier to analyze an already existing market.
When the market is large you can almost always carve out a stake. You already know the demand is there, you can get a share of it by reaching people who haven't heard of or don't like your competitor, or by doing something a little different and better. The risk and reward are both lower in these businesses vs a Valley style moonshot that VCs tend to like.
However if the market is just a few companies or the service depends heavily on network effects I wouldn't do it. E.g. the investment required to offer as many apps as Google Play or as many social updates as Facebook is huge, you can't really bootstrap your way into this, and people are only going to engage with so many app stores or social networks.
Apple is the quintessential example of "take a sad song, and make it better".
Long story short I’m glad this is a rule I broke and didn’t let my inspiration evaporate.
Competition is a fantastic signal of an existing market where customers are likely used to paying. I think the fear of replicating an existing idea is usually overblown while in reality every founder/entrepreneur ends up giving the solution his/her own unique touch. Even if you're blindly copying an existing product, you cannot help but add your past experience and your taste for products in it.
I elaborated more on this in my essay: https://invertedpassion.com/copying-ideas-is-highly-underrat...
If your idea isn't unique, you can still succeed, but you have to out-do the competition on something other than uniqueness.
We were somehow conditioned to believe that we either have to be the Founder or nothing. We are not losers if we are employees and not employers.
We don't have to be the CEO to pursue an idea we are passionate about.
And if it is impact that you want; think that most often, the impact you can have joining an existing successful company will be waay bigger than reinventing the wheel and building your own.
I do respect the nobility of wanting to be your own boss and doing your own awesome thing but in general(not giving advice for this specific case), that's not the only way..
Also, you’re going to need alignment between your funding, the skills of your team, and your proposed solution.
[1]: The Innovator’s Dilemma, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
What puts me off is usually the lack of a usable API. Or, if closed source app X has a gorilla that's holding the banana wrong, I might have to recreate the entire jungle from scratch just to get some basic architectural or UX flow fixed.
I really dislike Emby and Plex server (I don't want to besmirch them here but you can email me if you want a rant :) ), and as a result I've been working on/off on a product to replace them.
I probably won't monetize it any time soon, but it's not off the table honestly, since I personally feel that my system will be better. Even if it's not, I had a lot of fun making it.
So yeah, I tend to quit unless the idea is super unique.
Believe me: it’s not the idea that makes a great project / company. It’s the execution. It’s the market fit. It’s providing the best solution possible. It’s delighting your customers. It’s giving them real value for their money.
the problem I'm having is how do I enter a niche space and get customers away from my competition?
the niche I'm entering has existing solutions, but they're messy and difficult to use (based on early feedback). I want to simplify a lot of it, but I know in the beginning I'm going to lack a lot of features that current existing solutions have.
If I keep at it, I'm sure I'll get to them eventually, but I think the lack of some of these features could be a major deal breaker for some potential customers early on. I don't want to cater to just larger customers, but I don't want to ignore them either.
I'm just not sure what the right balance is going to be, but I think the only way I'm going to figure it out is by engaging with potential customers for their input, while also not pushing them to jump over unless they think we're ready.
My strategy now becomes how do I _disrupt_ the incumbent. I take inspiration from Apple entering mp3 market, Uber entering the taxi market or Google entering the search market. Have not yet achieve success but will continue to try.
That clarity can really help push your product forward in a crowded market. I also feel that doing 1 thing and doing it well or better at launch can really help.
Work on it anyway, if you can’t beat them, maybe you can join them one day. Even if you are second best, you will get free marketing from the #1, when potential customers do their due diligence.
Currently working on a (side project) small service where I know at least one place needs it. It's small enough in scope that I don't mind following it through to completion.
As they say, no idea is original. If you have one that is, go for it. Otherwise take a preexisting idea and make it yours. Do it in a way that's never been done before.
If you see something and think it could be done much better, then you're not building the same thing. Go for it!
Imo, its better if you start working on it, propose your solution and then see what exists. This might just help you think and ideate in an unbiased way
99% of the time, it would be a yes. Even if it didn't pass market.
I wrote a lesson about it in the Nugget Startup Academy but it's behind a paywall. Here's a screen shot of that lesson. Apologies about the format and hope it helps your thinking on the subject:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3ufpfrcarg7v5f3/competition.png?dl...
(Facebook is a reverse address book.)
i like how bill nguyen, founder of the color app, used to say, and i paraphrase, but he never cares about what other people have made, just focus on creating the best experience or something to that effect.
If you read Zoom's S1 filing, you will find they were profitable because they have their R&D in China.
