Ask HN: I have an idea how to become a competitor to Amazon. What should I do?

Ideas are dime a dozen, if you are an engineer, you don't need to hire anybody. Go out there and build a prototype. Find users that will use your prototype. If it has a positive growth, you can easily find funding for it. If you are already thinking about hiring another engineer, then I suggest you read more books on startups.

p2p Amazon?

To be frank, describing Amazon as an "online store" suggests a gross simplification of their business model. Amazon's business is built on traditional pillars of retailing: customer service, B2B relations and owning the best real-estate.

No competitor is going to get better deals with UPS, Fedex and USPS. Partially because Amazon has located warehouses such that they help negotiate better shipping contracts and thus provide better customer service.

It has dumped everything that could be a profit into expansion for twenty years. A newcomer would be hard pressed to sell me a Kindle, a movie download, a used book and bearings for my clothes dryer all on the same order at an attractive price and with an aggressive delivery schedule.

If your idea might have legs, some VC will back it.

Good luck.

If you're serious about this idea, you should run it by some of your friends/ co-workers that you respect. If they seem excited by it, continue to develop the idea with them and bounce ideas off them. Once you gather a group of people that work well together and have a general understanding of the problem/solution, start building an MVP. Competing with Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist, etc is extremely difficult because of positive network effects. Building a product to compete with the bigs guys is going to require an enormous amount of effort and a team that seriously believes in the product. If this is something you're set on gather a small team and get to building and tweaking. You may find that your competitive advantage doesn't exist, but you may also find that you can deliver in a way/space that the big guys can't. The key, however, is to get to building and chasing down users like there's nothing else that matters. Like others on here have said ideas are a dime a dozen, so just get to building.

There's a professor I know that claims he can get you back to 1994, but beware: he keeps calling everyone Marty and thinks there are people out to get him.

Amazon's prices are subsidized by EC2/AWS services. (For example, bulk purchasing of internet bandwidth for AWS results in a discount that greatly benefits Amazon's e-commerce need of bandwidth.)

Therefore, your first step is to spend a few billion dollars building datacenters, hiring programmers and product people, and create a competitor to AWS that has approximately equal market share. That should take 5-10 years.

When you are done, you can start your e-commerce system that competes with Amazon's. You'll have the infrastructure that costs about the same (i.e. is similarly subsidized) and you'll have a fair fight.

You should recruit the rest of a founding team that can get a working version built without hiring.

Y Combinator funds that sort of thing, and can help a lot with turning an idea into a growing business. You can still apply late for the Winter cycle, though if you don't have the complete team yet the Summer cycle might be better. http://www.ycombinator.com/apply

The way to think big is to think small. You can't go head to head against Amazon all at once. You need to pick a very small area and specialize.

Can you be the best site for selling pewter figurines, plumbing supplies or bowling equipment? I think you can!

By niching down you can develop a reputation, have a custom-tailored search and navigation setup, etc. As you start getting more customers and income, you can broaden your offerings.

For instance pewter figures -> fantasy art -> fantasy books -> board games.

Amazon started with books before it started selling everything else. You could try the exact same strategy.

You are an engineer . . . start building a basic MVP . . . don't worry about automating behind the scenes stuff . . . do all that stuff manually in the beginning if it's faster to get up and running. Think launch fast, like in 7 days or 30 days. Get the idea out there fast where people can use it and validate it.

You are going to need investments to roll out an idea on this scale. But work up an initial version to prove the concept. The farther you can bootstrap it the more equity you'll retain.

Network, find people who can work with. Develop the idea more.

Amazon just unveiled one-hour delivery. That was my idea. I'm crushed.