Ask HN: Are you put off building something because it already exists?
Big market, check. Validated demand, check. Product or service exists, uh-oh.
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?
300 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadThe 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.
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 :)
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'm not planning to build a billion dollar startup out of Typesense, so I don't face the same problems that Mongo and ES do. I also don't plan to offer a hosted version of Typesense. If somebody else fills that void, I will happy to let them do that. For an infrastructure product, there will always be people who want to run it in-house -- there is enough $$$ to be made in that space.
- https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic
- https://github.com/toshi-search/Toshi
Python Port: https://lucene.apache.org/pylucene/index.html
.NET Port: https://lucenenet.apache.org/
[1] https://xapian.org/
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).
But somehow with the products I work on, being seen as a knockoff is constantly on my mind.
If your customers are introduced to all of the products in your segment at the same time, they probably won't even know who is the "knockoff" and who is the original.
Also, when I think knockoff I think of some less than desirable product that isn't as good as the "original". Even after we know that Oreos are knockoffs, it doesn't change our perception of them because they make a high quality product that is desirable (if you're in their target market).
Many products that Apple makes could be considered "knockoffs" but again, most people don't think of them that way because they do an excellent job with design and use high quality materials.
It's probably a bit of imposter syndrome, but as long as your products are great then I wouldn't worry about going to market after a competitor.
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.)
That's all true, but also keep in mind that they will often charge as much as people are willing to pay so there can be room for a lower cost competitor to play. Even removing one (costly) feature and charging less could be a good option if it captures customers who didn't need that feature or wouldn't pay more than your lowest cost option to begin with.
Remember Google often kills off their services. They bought Picasa & the Nik Photography Collection & made them both available for free... now Picasa is gone (even though there's a ton of customers who still want it), and Google sold the Nik Collection to DxO and it's back to costing $70 again. And Fastmail exists even though Gmail is free.
Google is not known for providing friendly personal customer service... so why not aim to get your customers saying "yeah XYZ costs more, but oh my god, they have the friendliest & most hilarious people answering their emails, and they actually fixed my problem!" You can only do that if you've got money coming in to pay for the support team (you want to pay your employees well too, right?) Derek Sivers has some great ideas on doing awesome customer service:
https://sivers.org/cs
(Anyway, just some food for thought. Sometimes pricing cheap is absolutely the right thing, sometimes Charge More is the right thing. Experiment with both!)
There are plenty of users who are not happy with how the big companies create products. Google and Apple create for the mass market and in the process generally eschew features, functionality and quality of life improvements which a certain subset of users demand. That's why people pay for Evernote, Todoist etc even though Google/Apple notes and reminders exist. Some companies have even raised VC funding for creating calendar apps even when Google calendar exists.
If your potential customer is happy with the free product, then they were potentially never your customer in the first place. Creating product in such a niche won't be easy nor will it make you a billionaire. But there's a decent chunk of money to be made in both B2B and B2C.
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.
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 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.
I want to build the same thing. It seems hard so i haven't started working on it.
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.
They're called search engines, I heard Google was making a darn good one in 1998.
It does seem to be the case that a lot of things can be interpreted multiple different ways, which does require people to precisely state what they want.
I think a classic example if a house-cleaning robot told to keep the house as clean as possible, only for that robot to then try to murder the residents after correctly determining that the residents are a primary source of uncleanliness.
Within the system's own logic, I have to be super-careful to precisely specify exactly what I want something to do, much as someone working in any other system has to be careful to specify exactly what the code's supposed to do in its various use cases. But with user-facing applications, it'll tend to assume some default assumptions. For example, if you hire someone to clean your house and tell them to keep it as clean as possible, obviously they know not to murder people to accomplish that goal, as that intent has been communicated through other channels.
However, this also proves to be beneficial in a lot of cases. For example, if you say, "Go buy eggs from the store", but don't clarify which store, that can be interpreted multiple ways. Still, say that the first store happens to be out of eggs; then, it's good that a valid alternative interpretation exists, as the first attempt at interpretation wasn't viable.
Perhaps when viewed in the context of a more tightly defined problem set and solution space, and allowing for the advances in algorithms, AI and computing power since the 1970's - DNNs, evolutionary algos, backpropagation, annealing etc. -intentional goal-seeking self-programming should at least be conceivable.
This being a multitude of hard AI unsolved problems layered one on another. Such as building a fitness function or goal based on natural language input combined with context and refinement.
I know if two semi successful very limited attempts, one being Google DeepMind AutoML, the other being Bayou. They're really not too useful in practice anymore. (State of the art surpassed anything they are capable of.)
Apple is the quintessential example of "take a sad song, and make it better".
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...
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)
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...
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.
And Google Talk/Allo/Jibe is Jabber and Asterisk with a fancy coat of paint.
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.
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.
Google had the entire internet inedexed and was running their engine from Standford with just a few machines.
The internet was tiny back in 1997.
In 1997 there was 1 million web sites.
Today there are 2 billion.
[1] https://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/
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.
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
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.
As a small businessperson, I find it's critical to be aware of the different strengths and weaknesses that come with being big or small, and to leverage them to your advantage.
My favorite one-liner about the difference is: small companies make it possible, big companies make it cheap.
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.
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.
Doesn’t matter, they don’t need to dominate, just stake out a niche and distinguish themselves from the dominant player.
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'.
Delphi calls from 1998, it was even faster than Electron in development time and cost. Yet almost nobody uses it now.
What killed it? Just one has economic bust and developer generation change perhaps?
(And no, it was not networking, it had good capabilities the too. It wasn't web either.)
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.
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'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.
1. Time between walking in and paying.
2. Time between paying and receiving your food.
If one of those restaurants could maintain quality, and keep the above two metrics flat whilst a scaling to 4x, then the other 3 restaurants would lose business and eventually go out of business.
Online businesses don't usually have the same limits to scale.
https://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2008/03/25/game-theory-tu...
Not all but many, ask yourself if you've ever wondered how 7-8 chicken ships stay open when only one is good and ever has customers.
Something does
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.
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.
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.
- 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!).
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.
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.
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.
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!
> find it really hard to really trust if that's your contact information
Because Google implemented warning in their web browser, and you comply without understanding their reasons?
SSL is most useful for credit cards processing.
SSL makes some sense for e-mails and chat messages, also for authentication.
SSL is useless for static content.
I think Google did that for money, just sold the security story really well. They’re smart people, they can’t possibly be unaware of certificates being useless for majority of the web. Here’s the reasons.
Increases entry barrier, centralizing internet even more. For-profit internet companies have zero issues paying for certificates, it’s part of their business. It raises barrier for ordinary people. Also creates more incentive for placing ads on their web sites to reduce costs. Guess who earns most profits from internet ads?
Also, SSL breaks caching proxies by design. This opens market for technically inferior google AMP. Technically inferior, because proxies are closer to users, 20 years ago most office buildings had a caching proxy like Squid or MS ISA Server.
Also, there’s unintended consequence, users learning to ignore SSL errors and proceed anyway. People processing credit cards usually know what they do, take security seriously and SSL errors there often means what it’s supposed to mean, warns about potential hacks. People implementing SSL just to shut up the google browser don’t need security, they care much less and screw up much more often.
Lets encrypt is one obvious thing to mention here, besides removing the cost barrier to entry it really is quite simple to set up.
I haven’t tried but I think it’s only simple is you’re willing to manually renew every 90 days. I’m not willing to.
Automatic renewals are only simple for popular environments like LAMP, my web server runs Windows server with IIS and old school asp.net. I can run arbitrary native code on that server, but I don’t have GUI access to that machine.
But even if it would be super-easy and automated for 100% web servers, that’s still introducing a dependency to a third-party service, for no value for audience of my web site. Just shutting up a web browser that I don’t even use myself is not a good reason, IMO.
That's the opposite of the design goals - Let's Encrypt is designed to be automatable.
They set the expiry to 90 days precisely because they want you to automate the renewal.
https://letsencrypt.org/docs/client-options/#windows-iis
This is just... false. Without SSL, static content can be MITM'd just like anything else. Don't believe me? Connect to the WiFi in any Starbucks and visit http://example.com. That redirect to the Starbucks WiFi login page certainly isn't being served from example.com...
Please stop spreading misinformation about SSL.
Need to cross national borders for that, more than once.
> That redirect to the Starbucks WiFi login page certainly isn't being served from example.com
Also saw these things here in a couple of places. Most places here don’t charge for WiFi and have a single PSK key for all clients, but couple indeed ask for authentication this way.
I’m not sure how SSL helps? As a user, I don’t want to have access to WiFi blocked, I rather prefer redirects. Despite it’s technically MITM, it does the job i.e. allows to access the network.
> stop spreading misinformation about SSL
I have written that unless it’s credit card numbers or other sensitive content like e-mails or facebook messages, there’s very little security value in it, and it costs web sites owners. What exactly do you think is the misinformation in this statement?
SSL makes a lot of sense on web sites like facebook and youtube: users enter sensitive data there, servers serve terabytes of available content, not all of which is public, and even for public, the user’s selection is privacy-sensitive.
For a small static web sites, any person in the world can get their hands on all the content, that’s the whole point of public Internet. There’s no privacy-sensitive data in HTTP traffic to these sites, unless there’s google analytics, ads, or some other malware on that site.
Would you be happy if when I visited your website I was asked for my credit card details through a phishing scam? Not secure for me, not a good look for your site.
Lots of commenters have raised good points and pointed you to instructive resources on the subject, and you've quite selectively ignored the best ones. Please take a moment and withhold the assumption that we've all been brainwashed by Google, and consider that other people might know something you don't.
No it ain't. The cert is at least some assurance that the static content was not altered in transit between the original server and some MITM. Non-HTTPS sites absolutely suck to browse on less-scrupulous public wi-fi hotspots that try to inject their own ads into your browsing sessions (cough cough Greyhound cough cough).
> It raises barrier for ordinary people
Let's Encrypt has existed for multiple years now. There's certainly an effort-related barrier to entry, but not a financial one.
> 20 years ago most office buildings had a caching proxy like Squid or MS ISA Server.
And they can still have that by setting up their own internal CA and installing their own root cert on company-owned machines. Hell, running an internal CA is pretty standard practice for large enterprises (and even some medium ones) specifically so that Intranet applications can use TLS without browsers whining about self-signed certs.
One of the advantages of holding on to this idea for so long is that it's given me time to save a bit of a runway.
Hopefully the fabled Product/Market fit materialises before this runs out :)
* 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.
While it is harder marketing something that has no existing solutions like it, we've found that it's definitely not impossible.
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.
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.
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.
That said, the odds aren't in favor of the ones who are first to market (although patent ownership can change the odds significantly).
Thanks for sharing, it will help me in a current idea I have.
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.
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.
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.
But presumably if you combine it with the other stuff then it helps?
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?
The lack of marketing will always cause failure, but history is littered with examples of how marketing alone does not always win.
This might give the idea that good software is necessary [1] to win, but history has proven this is not always the case.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency
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.
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.
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.
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 enjoyed running the business up until about 15 employees. When it turned to 25 people I asked someone else to take over as CEO, which was a pretty good decision in hindsight. Circle is now 200 people, and the activities that the CEO does are not ones I would enjoy.
I'm the CTO of https://darklang.com now, and honestly I much prefer being CTO than CEO, especially now that I appreciate how hard being CEO is, and given that I'm working with a great CEO.