Ask HN: Could "Show HN" be shooting your site in the foot?
What is the purpose of showing your site to other entrepreneurs?
To show off your technical accomplishments to other techies even if that means handing your idea on a silver platter to other capable would-be entrepreneurs to work on?
"Ideas are a dime a dozen", I hear you say.
"Only execution matters."
Well, regardless, your execution is now or imminently in competition with that of other developers who read about you right here.
It seems to me a lot of "Show HN" is a cheap excuse for claiming you've done your part to drive traffic to your site, even if that traffic does not feed your bottom line and could run against your self-interest.
21 comments
[ 16.6 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadI am fairly open about my business, down to publishing sales stats, and every product I've ever released has been cloned. That is not a significant problem for my business. There is no beautician in the United States who is currently not using Appointment Reminder because it was cloned. There is a metric truckload who are not using it because my marketing is, to a first approximation, terrible. I optimize my efforts to improving the marketing rather than avoiding clones.
I'm with you on "driving traffic" being a value-destroying mindset, but do not agree that most people participate on HN to drive traffic.
This line of reasoning is horribly flawed. And besides, if someone other than you can take your idea, copy it, and eat your lunch... then they kind of deserve their success. At the "Show HN" stage, you already have something built, right? That means that even assuming that the mysterious "badass-hacker just sitting on HN waiting for an idea to copy" even exists, you should be far enough ahead that it doesn't matter.
How many motivated, hard-working, capable people do you think are lurking here, just waiting for somebody to drop an idea in their lap? Wouldn't the motivated, hard-working, capable people most likely already have their own projects to worry about, and therefore lack the resources to jump on "your" idea? And do you really care about the people who aren't motivated, hard-working and capable?
Personally I wouldn't hesitate in the slightest to talk about my project(s) here... anybody who's terribly likely to represent competition to me, probably either already is, or would be so anyway. And the rest are just gonna read, go "uh huh" and move on to the next comment.
Heck, I'm so unconcerned about "idea theft" that all my source code is open-source, and under the Apache license.
And to avoid an accusation of hypocrisy:
http://www.fogbeam.com
http://code.google.com/p/screwpile
edit: to be fair though, what I'm building isn't a "site," it's enterprise software, although a SaaS offering could be in the cards down the road. So my case doesn't technically fit the OP's question as worded. But I still stand by the contention that sharing here is most likely harmless.
Mostly to get feedback. Sometimes to get a little pat on the back, especially if motivation is dragging. But I suspect mostly it's to get sanity-checks and feedback for improvement.
Sometimes you've been so working hard on something that you're too close to it to evaluate it properly. Taking a few steps back from your project and getting feedback from HN is really handy for finding out whether you're in the weeds or not.
I've gotten incredibly useful feedback from my "Show HN" posts, without which I'd probably not have even continued my projects.
As for driving traffic, there's certainly an aspect of that, but mostly in the sense of establishing a toe-hold in the Google index and getting links from people who like what you produce and then later blog about you. I don't think (most) people are trolling for clients/customers here.
I posted my start-up here a long, long time ago. The feedback i got was invaluable and over the years as we've bootstrapped and worked on the concept privately(amidst our daily bump n grinds) ... the feedback(positive & negative) pushed us to think how to create this concept so its enjoyable, fun, as well as useful.
Happy to say a few years later we will be finally launching the core concept in next few days.
So thank you Hacker News!
As for competition, any Show HN posts that show off successful sites are successful because of a lot of reasons. I haven't seen a rash of Bingo Card Creator competitors or Balsamiq competitors-- and they are two of the most open "Show HN" guys that I can think of. Their businesses are continuing to prosper/grow.
Also it's the best possible market research. You show what you did to people and people tell you of similar things that already exist. No kind of passive surfing or googling can beat that.
I'll grant that there are some ideas where some particular knowledge and foresight is needed to appreciate the value, but a lot of ideas are good precisely because they establish a connection between seemingly disjoint things that, in retrospect, seems obvious.
If so, why are you doing it?
This is exactly the kind of question VCs used to ask. Why this, why now, and why you. If showing it to HN will cause people to say, "oh, that's obvious" and rush out to copy it, you are lacking an answer to the question "why you."
Because first to market makes a difference?
Because a good idea may also require a good implementation, which (depending on the idea) not everyone can pull off?
Because not every good idea is meant as VC fodder? You do it fast, milk it for what you can, and accept that eventually others will copy it and spoil the party.
My point exactly. "Why me" is "Because I'm the best in the world at doing this."
Do it fast, milk it for what you can, and accept that eventually others will copy it and spoil the party.
I agree. If you're in the game to do something fast, milk it for $$$, and then get out, then don't post it on HN. Not only is it not in your best interest, I can't imagine it being interesting to anyone besides another person in the game to do stuff fast and get out.
What you ought to post on HN is your business plan for having "deal flow," a funnel full of "do it fast" ideas. Some companies demonstrate a knack for constantly identifying and capitalizing on these temporary ideas and exploiting them.
That "meta-plan" for building a repeatable business would be damn interesting.
I can't say it'd never turn out the other way, but it'd have to be a really good idea that exactly fit my interests, but where the implementation being shown off was so bad that it seemed easy to beat.