7 ms·

People are so desperate to find viable business ideas. We discuss to death MVPs, fake landing pages, articles describing how to find and validate ideas and find

by kjksf 9y ago

People are so desperate to find viable business ideas. We discuss to death MVPs, fake landing pages, articles describing how to find and validate ideas and find first customers. Yet, no one notices when business opportunity stares them in the face. Go and duplicate screenhero. It's not that hard (Screenhero was written by 4 devs and 1 designer). They did YC in winter 2013 and got acquired by Slack in Jan 20015, so it's less than 2 years. You have a validated product that many people love and are willing to pay for and enough of a "outside of Slack" market to sustain a small company. On launch you'll get free PR just by announcing "Screenhero alternative". And if you do a good job, it's likely that Atlassian (or some other Slack competitor) will want to acquire you for a tidy sum. Lot's of the hard code has been written for you (libraries for stun firewall traversal, vp8 for the video codec). You need to write a simple backend for matching people and 2 desktop apps (mac and windows). It's not easy but it's also not a problem that requires breaking new ground, just solid engineering. What we get instead are pleas to Slack to not kill stand-alone Screenhero and bemoaning that someone didn't write OSS (aka free) clone.

zpr 9y ago
You mean you could make a YouTube clone in a weekend? It's easy to fall into this way of thinking. But hey, maybe you will build the next Screenhero, or TeamViewer. Or maybe you'll end up as one of the thousands of other versions of this nobody has ever heard of. The idea is usually not the hard part.
- derefr 9y ago
  No, but you can probably build YouTube in two years. (Yes, including their global CDN.) Also, “exact replacement for killed product” is a realy good advertising pitch to differentiate from those thousand other versions. It worked for The Old Reader, and later Feedly, when Google Reader was killed.
- kjksf 9y ago
  I mean that you can make a Screenhero clone in approximately the same amount of time that it took to write it originally. Should be a bit less because straight path (cloning) is shorter than twisty one (things that Screenhero did that did not end up in the final product). Note that by the time of Slack acquisition Screenhero was approaching v2.0, they had product out far longer than that. So it's not unreasonable to say you could do a v1 of similar product in a year. Both idea and execution are hard. Cloning existing idea removes one hard part, therefore increasing the chances of success. Look at Excel, Word or Baidu or Sina Weibo. As to "thousands of other versions of this": you would have to point to at least one. It's hard to argue against imaginary products. Based on this thread for many people Screenhero has no acceptable substitute.
  - zpr 9y ago
    I can agree that when you have clearly defined business goals its easier to spit out a product. And I'm not arguing that you could make something similar to Screenhero in a year -- the hard part would be to distinguish it from the thousands of others. You could find examples with some Googling (remote desktop software, screen sharing software): GoToMeeting, Join.me, LogMeIn/Hamachi, RealVNC, not to mention built in RDC in Windows, etc. Those are just the famous/obvious ones. If you kept digging, I'm sure you could easily find hundreds if not thousands of similar solutions. I understand they're slightly different from one another, and I suppose its possible all the commenters here went through each and every one of these options and found nothing useable but it seems unlikely to me, and similarly unlikely the +1 one would make in this pool would be any sort of revolutionary "game changer" VCs would mob onto. The space seems well-established or dare I say it "saturated".
- fragmede 9y ago
  If you made $5 million but nobody would ever know about it, or who you are, would you make a YouTube clone? You're right that the idea is the easy part. Still, there are a number of TeamViewer clones, ranging from terrible to pretty good. They may not have the same brand recognition but TeamViewer is quite expensive and not everyone is willing to pay top dollar.
tlogan 9y ago
Sadly this is not true. There are so many excellent applications and SaaS - but they die very fast. If the company which builds an excellent solution does not get acquired they will learn the meaning of the word "hell on earth": customer acquisition baby. Customer acquisition is not easy. Of course, customer acquisition is easier if your product does not suck - but not so much.
- kjksf 9y ago
  Screenhero clearly has customers. See all the people on this thread that are sad that Screenhero is going away. You could get your first 10 customers just by contacting those people. I'm not disputing that customer acquisition is hard but that's exactly why cloning Screenhero is better than doing any random idea. Also, you would have to list a couple of those "excellent applications that die very fast" before I just take your word for it. Personally I see many not so great applications that do decent business and have never seen an excellent application that died.
  - speedplane 9y ago
    > have never seen an excellent application that died Really? Lots of companies with better/faster/cheaper products go under... I feel like most do. Very few products are so good that they sell themselves.
gcheong 9y ago
Yet Screenhero had been at it for 4 years at least, presumably had ongoing guidance from and access to the great business minds at YC and yet in the end decided that the best value they could get for their product was as a feature of Slack.
- kjksf 9y ago
  I don't see an issue here. They made a useful app and probably would have at least a multi-million dollar business, eventually. As it happens, that was worth much more to Slack so they probably got a good immediate payday and stock in very promising company. For 2 years of work, I would say that's a great success.
yeswecatan 9y ago
I'm sure it's not that simple. If there were an open source version I'd love to contribute.
sogen 9y ago
Previous discussion, with at least 20 alternatives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13620626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13620626
- kjksf 9y ago
  As far as I know there is no Screenhero alternative. Most of the apps listed are for video conferencing and "simple screen sharing". That's not what Screenhero does. Screenhero is for collaborating with other people on arbitrary applications.
bgdx 9y ago
I would not have noticed this opportunity because Google hangouts is just one tab/new window away. The lesson for me here is not to care about competitors.
ajmurmann 9y ago
A friend and I were fed up with the situation a while ago and started work on something that should fit your expectations. I expect it should be available very early 2018.

by kjksf 9y ago

zpr 9y ago

You mean you could make a YouTube clone in a weekend? It's easy to fall into this way of thinking. But hey, maybe you will build the next Screenhero, or TeamViewer. Or maybe you'll end up as one of the thousands of other versions of this nobody has ever heard of. The idea is usually not the hard part.

derefr 9y ago
No, but you can probably build YouTube in two years. (Yes, including their global CDN.) Also, “exact replacement for killed product” is a realy good advertising pitch to differentiate from those thousand other versions. It worked for The Old Reader, and later Feedly, when Google Reader was killed.
kjksf 9y ago
I mean that you can make a Screenhero clone in approximately the same amount of time that it took to write it originally. Should be a bit less because straight path (cloning) is shorter than twisty one (things that Screenhero did that did not end up in the final product). Note that by the time of Slack acquisition Screenhero was approaching v2.0, they had product out far longer than that. So it's not unreasonable to say you could do a v1 of similar product in a year. Both idea and execution are hard. Cloning existing idea removes one hard part, therefore increasing the chances of success. Look at Excel, Word or Baidu or Sina Weibo. As to "thousands of other versions of this": you would have to point to at least one. It's hard to argue against imaginary products. Based on this thread for many people Screenhero has no acceptable substitute.
- zpr 9y ago
  I can agree that when you have clearly defined business goals its easier to spit out a product. And I'm not arguing that you could make something similar to Screenhero in a year -- the hard part would be to distinguish it from the thousands of others. You could find examples with some Googling (remote desktop software, screen sharing software): GoToMeeting, Join.me, LogMeIn/Hamachi, RealVNC, not to mention built in RDC in Windows, etc. Those are just the famous/obvious ones. If you kept digging, I'm sure you could easily find hundreds if not thousands of similar solutions. I understand they're slightly different from one another, and I suppose its possible all the commenters here went through each and every one of these options and found nothing useable but it seems unlikely to me, and similarly unlikely the +1 one would make in this pool would be any sort of revolutionary "game changer" VCs would mob onto. The space seems well-established or dare I say it "saturated".
fragmede 9y ago
If you made $5 million but nobody would ever know about it, or who you are, would you make a YouTube clone? You're right that the idea is the easy part. Still, there are a number of TeamViewer clones, ranging from terrible to pretty good. They may not have the same brand recognition but TeamViewer is quite expensive and not everyone is willing to pay top dollar.

tlogan 9y ago

Sadly this is not true. There are so many excellent applications and SaaS - but they die very fast. If the company which builds an excellent solution does not get acquired they will learn the meaning of the word "hell on earth": customer acquisition baby. Customer acquisition is not easy. Of course, customer acquisition is easier if your product does not suck - but not so much.

kjksf 9y ago
Screenhero clearly has customers. See all the people on this thread that are sad that Screenhero is going away. You could get your first 10 customers just by contacting those people. I'm not disputing that customer acquisition is hard but that's exactly why cloning Screenhero is better than doing any random idea. Also, you would have to list a couple of those "excellent applications that die very fast" before I just take your word for it. Personally I see many not so great applications that do decent business and have never seen an excellent application that died.
- speedplane 9y ago
  > have never seen an excellent application that died Really? Lots of companies with better/faster/cheaper products go under... I feel like most do. Very few products are so good that they sell themselves.

gcheong 9y ago

Yet Screenhero had been at it for 4 years at least, presumably had ongoing guidance from and access to the great business minds at YC and yet in the end decided that the best value they could get for their product was as a feature of Slack.

kjksf 9y ago
I don't see an issue here. They made a useful app and probably would have at least a multi-million dollar business, eventually. As it happens, that was worth much more to Slack so they probably got a good immediate payday and stock in very promising company. For 2 years of work, I would say that's a great success.

yeswecatan 9y ago

I'm sure it's not that simple. If there were an open source version I'd love to contribute.

sogen 9y ago

Previous discussion, with at least 20 alternatives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13620626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13620626

kjksf 9y ago
As far as I know there is no Screenhero alternative. Most of the apps listed are for video conferencing and "simple screen sharing". That's not what Screenhero does. Screenhero is for collaborating with other people on arbitrary applications.

bgdx 9y ago

I would not have noticed this opportunity because Google hangouts is just one tab/new window away. The lesson for me here is not to care about competitors.

ajmurmann 9y ago

A friend and I were fed up with the situation a while ago and started work on something that should fit your expectations. I expect it should be available very early 2018.