HN Explorer

Ask HN: How to know if a startup concept has already been done

11 points by m4nu ↗ HN
Starting with the assumption that whatever startup idea I can have it's already been done in some form somewhere. How would you go about digging out those attempts ? (I mean beside googling which more often than not will yield nothing relevant)

12 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 26.8 ms ] thread
anderspetersson
Dont. If it already is a company making money from you idea, there's more room, so it does not matter.
jamessantiago
Perform market research

Entrepreneurship starts with creating a business plan. Part of that business plan is identifying your target market, your competition, and defining how you are unique. It's not so much that something has been done before but rather what sets you apart. If your concern is legal, then patents (google scholar) and trademarks are what you should be looking at. Copywrite is a bit more difficult but after performing your market research you should have an idea of what's out there. In other words, who is your target market and what are they using now that your startup is aiming to satisfy?

dangrossman
> Copywrite is a bit more difficult

Unless you're copying someone else's code, text or graphics, you're not infringing their copyright. Copyright would be the "easy one" since it's near impossible to accidentally infringe, unlike trademarks or patents.

GamblersFallacy
Google wasn't the 1st search engine, Facebook wasn't the 1st social network, Youtube wasn't the 1st video site.

Execution trumps first mover advantage.

dayone
improve upon the existing ideas which are poorly executed.
Terr_
Or which were well-executed, but occurred too-early for whatever market to form. (As you get older, you see this more and more.)
patio11
This is one of those "Certainly feels like work, but does not actually advance the business forward, so why bother doing it?" sort of tasks.
dennisgorelik
Do you mean that researching competition does not advance business forward?

Why not?

Learning from competitors could occasionally be more valuable than learning from customers.

cat9
The most useful refactoring of this is, "have non-sales conversations with actual intended customers, learn about how they see this problem including how they're currently dealing with it, which may or may not include existing tools."

At which point, we're talking about basic customer development interviews, which are way more useful than "google up a list of possible alternatives."

mtmail
If there is a company already solving the same problem and you can't find it within 1h of internet research then they're doing bad marketing and you have a good chance. The potential customers won't find them either.
richardbrevig
In my case, Google did not find a competitor that ranks within 30k on Alexa, has the keywords on their homepage, and has $21m in funding. I found them after weeks of research. Don't remember the exact blog/comment/thread, but it wasn't within an hour of beginning my research. :)
richardbrevig
Assuming your startup idea is SaaS/web app...

Search on:

* /r/startups and /r/entrepreneur on reddit

* betalist.com

* startuplist.com

* techcrunch

* thenextweb

* venturebeat

I'm working on solving this problem. If you're interested, sign up to stay updated: rivalseek.com