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Ask HN: What do you do when someone gets to market before you?

4 points by rozap ↗ HN
Was working on an idea for the past year or so, not full time or anything, but I sunk some hours into it. About 75% of the way there now, and things are moving faster. Yesterday an app launched that was essentially the same thing. I'm a little bummed out, but thinking about what to do now.

Has this happened to anyone else? Did you give up and move on? Or did you shift the focus so there were some big differences between competitors?

Thanks

8 comments

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needleme
I'd say to study them and use their "weak point" to make your app better! This might slow down your work but it might worth the time.
jaredsohn
Also, the competitor's launch can be helpful in that there are now a lot more people that understand what your app does and might be looking for a better or more customized-to-their-needs version.
magic_man
What is your app? Facebook started after myspace and friendster and we know how that turned out.
rubinelli
This is great; you have just received validation that there is a market out there for your app. How big is this competitor and how far are you from launching?

(If you are talking about a Google I/O launch, well... don't give up yet. You never know when a project will join the Nexus Q and Google Reader.)

rozap
Not sure how big the competitor is in terms of manpower, but it looks like ~40k downloads over the past 24 hours, though the reviews on implementation have been mediocre, because they're being flooded with users which took their site down.

As far as launching mine, probably 80 hours of work.

rubinelli
I say go for it. There's more than enough market for you two, and if you do a better job than them, you can get a very nice slice of the pie.
ig1
What's the size of the market ? - assuming it's substantial I wouldn't overly worry about it. But it's important to think about your longer term competitive advantages and how you'll defend them.

Your product will naturally evolve as a result of interactions with your customers, so to some extent your products will diverge naturally anyway.

NameNickHN
You've still the chance to be better than them in every way (features, quality, marketing). Nothing's lost yet.