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Ask YC: Can “a gay in a garage” compete with big and established companies.

1 points by aquarin ↗ HN
I am planing to create a startup product which is a server based software (finance messaging). Do you think that “a guy in a garage” can compete with big and established companies with such kind of product and what strategy to use to spread the product popularity (license (open source?), other products interoperability).

10 comments

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robmnl
Create a great product. Focus a lot on how you can be better.
cperciva
I'm guessing that there's a typo in the title... I imagine "a gay in a garage" is just as likely to be successful as any other guy in a garage.

But to answer the question: If you're going to get into a fight with an elephant, the trick is to avoid being directly in front of it when it charges. Yes, you can compete -- but compete by doing something different, not by duplicating what they're already doing.

tim2
Making an open source project into a startup seems like a very long road. I don't know this particular area (finance messaging) though.
aquarin
Why open source is considered to be "long road"? I assume open source to be important to financial institutions (auditing, regulations, etc.).
Shooter
I would say that open-source is a "long road" for financial institutions, in general, even if it is not for rational reasons. They are concerned about crooks finding vulnerabilities they can exploit in open codebases, for example, and they are concerned about always having a 'throat to choke' in the form of a very solid support services provider. Only when an open-source project is huge and very well-supported by several large systems companies do most institutions start to come around. Linux, for example, has been hugely embraced by financial institutions...but most of that acceptance took place only after Red Hat, IBM (etc. etc.) were around for services/support contracts. Financial institutions do NOT like risk. They absolutely HATE risk. A guy in a garage is a huge risk for them, even if you do develop a killer product/service.

As a 'guy in a garage,' I'm not sure a financial messaging product would be my choice to focus on, open-source or not. It is a rather difficult market even for well-financed companies with teams of programmers and salespeople. Isn't there another market where your skills might be better leveraged?

aquarin
You are right. I have the same impressions about the conservativeness of the financial institutions. This is one of the ideas I am evaluating now, counting the pros and cons. I can focus on other "messaging" areas not necessarily related to financial messaging.
Shooter
Yes, darling, and you can be more FABULOUS too!

I think maybe you could start jetting (it's an accelerated version of planing) to compete with big companies by leveraging open-source finance messaging products like RabbitMQ instead of starting from scratch. Then you can concentrate on new functionality with a solid foundation.

You might want to invest in a spel-chekker, as well.

aquarin
I have to apologize for spelling mistakes, but do not expect that all YC readers are native English speakers.
Shooter
My comment wasn't intended to be mean-spirited. I just couldn't resist the 'gay' and 'planing' bait, that's all ;-)

I certainly don't expect all YC readers to be native English speakers. I did try to be helpful (AMQP/RabbitMQ suggestion), but without knowing more details about your idea it is difficult to help. My company does quite a bit of work in the financial messaging area (as a user, not as a SaaS provider), so I'd like to hear more about your ideas.

aquarin
Yes, it is about AMPQ. Just a hypothesis, that implementing it in Haskell instead of Erlang is a great idea :) (e.g. provability of correctness of implementation etc.)