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Ask HN: Are you put off building something because it already exists?

• WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
  I used to think that once a product was created it made no sense to try to produce another one. It's not a valid reason not to try. If you can make the product better or have a way to monetize it then it's a good idea to try. The 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.
• karterk 7y ago
  It depends on the size of the total addressable market. If the size of your target market is big, even if there are bigger established players, there is always a chance for a small, nimble product to carve out a niche. Established players often head upmarket (especially if they are VC funded). This often gives an opening for a new entrant to capture some of the SMB market share. 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 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 :)
  • alphagrep12345 7y ago
    Interesting idea. How's it going so far? Do you have any customers?
    • karterk 7y ago
      Started this as an open source project with the goal of first creating an ecosystem. So far, I have been getting good reviews from people who are using it as a search solution. 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.
      • notimetorelax 7y ago
        How do you protect yourself from Amazon offering it on their cloud? Same issue as MongoDB and Elasticsearch.
        • karterk 7y ago
          Good question, and something that's always on the minds of open core companies these days. In my case, I don't mind, and in fact would welcome it! It would solve my no.1 pain point: discoverability. 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.
        • strimp099 7y ago
          Surprising, AWS is quite open with startups about potential cannibalization if you can form a relationship with the Accelerate program.
  • blacksoil 7y ago
    I'm one of the people who'd definitely use an alternative to ElasticSearch! I hate the fact that elastic search is using Java. It just takes up too much memory.
• graphememes 7y ago
  Quite a few things.
• woutr_be 7y ago
  Mine is mostly a mental problem, I feel like my product will never be good enough compared to others. Even right now, I'm working on a simple website for a specific niche, but there's already another website that does exactly the same thing. I feel like people will just think I copied there idea, or that they might have better content than me. It's always been an issue for me, and because of it, I've never been able to finish anything.
  • bonestamp2 7y ago
    > there's already another website that does exactly the same thing 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).
    • woutr_be 7y ago
      I understand that, I also compare services / products and make a decision, even if one is a copy of the other, I generally don't really care about it. (Unless it's just a 1-to-1 knockoff) But somehow with the products I work on, being seen as a knockoff is constantly on my mind.
      • bonestamp2 7y ago
        Fair enough, but keep in mind that Oreo cookies are a knockoff. But nobody thinks of them that way because they're the best known cookie of that type and usually the first cookie of that type that someone tries. It is the original in their 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.
• manav 7y ago
  Just because something exists, doesn't mean it can't be done better, faster, smarter, cheaper. In fact it's usually a good sign that someone else built it first because it may indicate a valid market.
  • wolco 7y ago
    Exactly this, the market is validated. Can you find an opening? The game changes more to marketing.
    • 0n34n7 7y ago
      And to a certain extent: cost.
• zzo38computer 7y ago
  Not really; even if it already exist it may be different from what I want in various ways, so, I can make up a new one. (In the case of FOSS, sometimes it is suitable to modify an existing one, although also sometimes not.)
• sonnyblarney 7y ago
  Consider that 99% of new products are evolutionary, they don't represent a fundamental new approach or a fundamental new innovation. Most real innovation is incremental, and small, and new 'great products' are a compendium of a lot of little things.
• semireg 7y ago
  I’ve had this feeling since I used my first Zebra label printer back in ... 2003? It wasn’t until 2012 I was working on the backend programming of Zebra printers that I realized Macs had very little support for designing and printing labels. I created a one off (as in still at version 1.0) native Mac app that used a transparent window and printed whatever was behind it. It is called LabelScope. 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 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.
  • blacksoil 7y ago
    That's pretty cool! Thanks for sharing. You should post it to indiehackers.com, people would learn so much from your experience :)
  • kkarakk 7y ago
    you should write a paid react native/flutter/xamarin library. corporate apps use label libraries a lot and they usually suck coz provided by manufacturers. lots of man hours could be saved
• _Nat_ 7y ago
  I've long been baffled as to why what I'm building doesn't already exist. Sure it's tough to actually design-and-make, but it's basically a holy grail of computing that a ton of people have, I think, generally wanted since long before I was born. 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.
  • mkagenius 7y ago
    > Intentional system I want to build the same thing. It seems hard so i haven't started working on it.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • halter73 7y ago
    > I'm building an "intentional system". The idea's that you just tell the computer what to do, and it does it the best way possible. This includes figuring out what you told it to do, how to do that, how to optimize it, etc., in a provably optimal way. 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.
• myth2018 7y ago
  No. And I think that creating something entirely new is overrated sometimes: one might argue that it's a requirement for a startup to achieve skyrocketing growth rates. But it's pretty feasible to build a healthy business creating a new version of something, specially on fields where customer relationship and after-sales services play an important role. That's been my experience at least.
• sriku 7y ago
  I think it will help if you know why what you're going to build is going to be better than what exists. Like Google knew its search will be better, like Zoom knows its conf is better than WebEx. Apple is the quintessential example of "take a sad song, and make it better".
• BinaryIdiot 7y ago
  For sure. I have concepts written down for things like a social network where the user retains ownership of their data and advertisers can offer them money for access to it. There are partial concepts out there like this but the biggest issue preventing me from creating a prototype is simply that I don't think I have the time to nurture a social network into being (which is probably harder than creating the thing). You need people on it to gain other people, a real chick and egg problem. 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.
  • theNJR 7y ago
    I’ve got tons of pages written for a similar concept, only you pay for it. Just as filters were the utility that drove the users which created the network for early Instagram, I think data ownership can be the utility that drives users for a for-pay social network. 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-social-network-focus-on-what-mat https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/factr/factr-the-ethical...
• nexuist 7y ago
  A while ago, I was in the same boat. Why try to recreate GitHub, or Uber, or Salesforce, or Facebook? And once I discovered any competitors in my idea's field, I would chalk it down to "not worth trying" and call it a day. 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-your-birthday-an-advantage-in-school-malcolm-gladwell-thinks-it-is.html https://educationinnovation.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/12/is... (yeah, weird source, but I'm just trying to define the phrase)
  • blacksoil 7y ago
    You're making a really good insight here. I just wanna give some examples to add to your point. Here in Indonesia there are 2 big Uber clone (at least initially): Gojek and Grab that are both unicorn. In the beginning, they both started off ride-hailing. But after about 4 years, Gojek morphed into a payment company like Chinese We-Pay. It seems they were thinking of ride-hailing as a good customer-acquisition strategy in order to build the initial user base. On the other hand, Grab still seems to be focused on being a transport company, but they expand to a lot more countries. Their main strategy seems to be South East Asia expansion. I think these are very cool examples on how two seemingly the same thing end up diverging and finding up their own path.
• scrollaway 7y ago
  It depends whether you're building something for the utility of it or to make money. 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.
• kasey_junk 7y ago
  Who was the existing provider cause I could use that.
• rb808 7y ago
  Depends on how your product will compete, but being first entrant isn't always good. Apple copied their PC from IBM, their tablet from Microsoft, and their ipod from others. They're successful because they do it better. Can you?
  • wolco 7y ago
    Or cheaper or faster or easier or targetted to a different group
• lxmorj 7y ago
  If you haven’t heard of them without doing competitive research, but you are in the target market, then you can at least beat them at getting the word out.
• rdm_blackhole 7y ago
  I am in the same boat, I started a side project a few months ago and released the MVP without looking too much into the competition. But it turns out there is a lot of it. 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.
  • wolco 7y ago
    There are advantages because you can see what features work or not before you build them into your product.
    • rdm_blackhole 7y ago
      Yes, I have actually been copying/improving existing features from the competitors while trying to improve some of the things that I consider "bad user experience"
  • jmkni 7y ago
    Lovely. If you are enjoying yourself and learning new things, why stop? Worst case scenario, it won't work as a business, and you will have learned some new skills.
• shishy 7y ago
  Competition is the fun part! Once you see existing products/services, you can use them as a proxy to validate some aspects of your idea, but also study from them to see what they're lacking: - 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!).
• beckler 7y ago
  honestly, I don't mind something similar already exists. 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.
• wintercarver 7y ago
  My favorite example of this is jet.com - who in their right mind would compete directly with Amazon on Amazon’s home turf? Well, it turns out it only looked like the same turf (“e-commerce”), but that’s the catch. Differentiation is subtle yet powerful, and Jet.com went for slower, bulk commodities, with a different pricing approach. Markets are, apparently, full of fickle niches!
• Lowkeyloki 7y ago
  I'm a chronic wheel reinventor. If you're trying to make money off of your project, your mileage may vary. However, I've found that there are plenty of good reasons to reinvent the wheel. Although I'd very rarely reinvent the wheel when I'm doing something for pay as that implies issues like deadlines and maintainability, I do it all the time for personal projects. 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.
• alexobenauer 7y ago
  Here's the recommendation I give to students when they ask me this question (it's a common one!): 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.
  • q-base 7y ago
    This is very good advice.
  • dfex 7y ago
    Brilliant advice. 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!
• pbiggar 7y ago
  When we started CircleCI, there were at least 3 other things that were pretty much the same. In addition, two similar services had died, and one had pivoted to be a PaaS. There was also Jenkins, TeamCity, Bamboo, and lots of other alternatives. And then over the next two years, there was at least 20 competitors that started, some with significant funding. I agonized over so many competitors, and none of them mattered. If you're going to do it, just do it.
  • prabugp 7y ago
    That’s inspiring! Did you get to a point where the joy of creating something was superseded by the need to keep it alive and winning? How do you balance both? Often I worry that when a product that I feel so passionate about turns into a business, then the time I spend running the business (which I might not like) will be far more than what I’ll spend working on the product. Not sure if it will be as much fun. Also is it still the same thing that you envisioned when you first stared?
    • pbiggar 7y ago
      I was always looking to make a business, though I really enjoy the creation and product side of things. It turned into a business pretty quick, though: we had customers within 3 months and paying customers within 6. 18 months later we had $1m ARR. 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 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.
• brentadamson 7y ago
  I've been building Jive Search. There's already tons of competitors in search (Google, Bing, etc.). There's also DuckDuckGo, StartPage, etc. that claim to be privacy-focused but are just as opaque as Google. The niche I'm targeting is users that understand that for true privacy in search you have to be transparent and open source so that users can view the code and run it on their own if they want.
• the_arun 7y ago
  When I started thinking about home security - Comcast & companies like Arlo came existence. But, they are not good enough from customer standpoint. Lots of opportunities still exist for disruption - when we think from end customer standpoint.
• Animats 7y ago
  First question: are you rich? Because you're going to have to buy market share.
• xtagon 7y ago
  I think it makes a difference whether you're looking for ideas that will do well, vs just having an idea that you would go for as a pet project. I have one of those "just a pet project" ideas which I have been developing for no reason other than my own benefit, and let me tell you, I love finding competition. It's like Christmas every time I find out there's a service that incorporates some of the concepts, and I keep a big document of inspiration that draws between all of them. If your idea isn't unique, you can still succeed, but you have to out-do the competition on something other than uniqueness.
• dschuetz 7y ago
  I gave up trying to invent something unique (because trying too hard tells you that you are failing), but I constantly contemplate on ideas to make something that already exists better. There are many things that are already great, but some weird or restrictive design decisions are making it impossible for me to accept their 'greatness'. Take the G5 Power Mac, for instance. At the time it really was one of the greatest products Apple ever conceived. But then came some weird design decisions, partly due to IBM's inability to provide more efficient chip designs and it all went to hell. Coolant leakage, overheating, insane power consumption. Since then I've been trying to come up with ideas to make the Power Mac design a thing again, but with another system inside.
• mch82 7y ago
  Clayton Christensen publishes “The Innovator’s Dilemma” in 1997.[1] No incumbent is safe. It can be easier to be first to market, but being first doesn’t mean permanent victory. If you believe your solution solves a problem people have then it’s a fine choice to keep going. Also, you’re going to need alignment between your funding, the skills of your team, and your proposed solution. [1]: The Innovator’s Dilemma, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
• abhinuvpitale 7y ago
  Does looking it up afterwards help or not? Imo, its better if you start working on it, propose your solution and then see what exists. This might just help you think and ideate in an unbiased way
• badatshipping 7y ago
  I try to ask myself, if I execute this idea really well vs. really badly, what is the full range of possible outcomes? If the range isn’t that big then the problem doesn’t really matter. This has saved me from building a lot of cool, neat stuff that isn’t important. I think my current idea (a new IDE) has potential to be very important, and I think I’m going to do 2 or 3 key things better than my competitors, so I just have to do it :) It doesn’t matter who else is doing it.
• abraae 7y ago
  I was told early in my career that you can't sell something unless you have competitors. it's not universally true I expect but many potential customers operate from the mindset that a) if you have no competitors, it's not a real thing and b) there's no hurry for them to look into it.
• jv22222 7y ago
  This is quite a nuanced subject. It's something I've had a chance to think long and hard about and discuss with many founders. I wrote a lesson about it in the Nugget Startup Academy but it's behind a paywall. Here's a screen shot of that lesson. Apologies about the format and hope it helps your thinking on the subject: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3ufpfrcarg7v5f3/competition.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/3ufpfrcarg7v5f3/competition.png?dl...
• naveen99 7y ago
  Can you link to the existing implementation? Is it keybase ? Work on it anyway, if you can’t beat them, maybe you can join them one day. Even if you are second best, you will get free marketing from the #1, when potential customers do their due diligence.
• mceachen 7y ago
  I voluntarily entered one of the most saturated markets that I'm aware of. It's literally a cliché to "do a photo startup." That rumbling dark cloud of well-funded, well-established competitors on the horizon, and (perhaps my mistaken) belief that I see gaps of sunshine where I can succeed, is one reason I get out of bed every morning and persevere. That, and my wife needs the product. https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ (forgive the Always Be Selling, please!) It was common sentiment when I went through YC that many excellent ideas would be dismissed by investors due to perceived existing competition or absence of market. Only rapid execution, iteration, and customer feedback can actually determine if the idea has legs and can find product market fit.
  • dusted 7y ago
    That looks interesting, and what sets it apart from other solutions that I know of, is that would allow me to host it myself, so instead of handing over my precious pixels to some company.
  • markdown 7y ago
    This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, so I have to point out that clicking your logo while in the blog takes you to the blog index, rather than the site home page. This is wrong.
  • adhambadr 7y ago
    im in the Smartphone business, talk about saturated :D ! btw love your product, some of my customers have asked us about something similar perhaps we could collaborate.
  • mlloyd 7y ago
    I wish the post you linked to had some sort of demo of what the software does. Even if it's just a quick gif that runs through landing and clicking a few options. I think I get it from the post, but seeing it would be so much more helpful.
• taherchhabra 7y ago
  I am in the same boat as you are in.I Have so many ideas but not sure which one to follow. I found steve blank's "The startup owner's manual" very useful in evaluating ideas. I have created this excel(https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Cap3CIWHJq3WdAypU6l3y_02e5L0xi8tubMYC5cpS04/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Cap3CIWHJq3WdAypU6l3...) using the website http://www.guidearama.com/guides/fwb.html http://www.guidearama.com/guides/fwb.html
• d--b 7y ago
  I think one of the question to ask yourself is: is that competing product the one I'd have built? Is it a product that would solve the problem I wanted to solve perfectly? Is that product awesome? If the answer's yes, you probably should stop. Because at best, you'd make the same product. If not, see where the product fails and try and estimate what could be better and is it worth it. Last, remember that the later you are on the market, the more expensive it gets to get attention. You'll either need cash or need to seek funding.
• guybedo 7y ago
  It's pretty hard nowadays to come up with a brilliant unique idea that has never been implemented before. I'm not even sure it's possible at all. Competition means there's a market and customers willing to pay for a product. This is a validation of your idea. Now, unless you're shooting for the unicorn status, there's a pretty good chance you can build a good product, compete and get enough customers to make a living. You don't have to be the best or the cheapest to compete and you don't need hundreds of thousands of customers to make a living. In the end, i think it really depends on what you're trying to achieve: unicorn status or small side project that you'll enjoy working on and might someday become a full time job. Either way you should try to do what you love, or if that's not an option, to learn to love what you do. That way, even if you don't succeed, your time won't be wasted and will be spent doing something you love.
• keithnz 7y ago
  Yes! But ironically I'm also put off by things not being done. Currently working on a (side project) small service where I know at least one place needs it. It's small enough in scope that I don't mind following it through to completion.
• lquist 7y ago
  The heuristic for this is can you make the product 10x better (along a dimension that matters) for some subset of consumers? The subset can be equal to the set: Zoom makes video conferencing 10x better on reliability for the whole market. That said, that case is much rarer. It is often much easier to deeply understand the needs of a subset of users and make a tailored solution that delivers a 10x outcome to that set of users. Examples here are CRMs that specialize on industry verticals vs Salesforce. A pharmaceutical CRM is functionally very different than a one size fits all CRM. PS Also, stop looking for big markets. Look for a small market that you can dominate quickly and logically extend from there. PPS Most ideas here stolen from Thiel
• paraschopra 7y ago
  Copying ideas is highly underrated. Competition is a fantastic signal of an existing market where customers are likely used to paying. I think the fear of replicating an existing idea is usually overblown while in reality every founder/entrepreneur ends up giving the solution his/her own unique touch. Even if you're blindly copying an existing product, you cannot help but add your past experience and your taste for products in it. I elaborated more on this in my essay: https://invertedpassion.com/copying-ideas-is-highly-underrated/ https://invertedpassion.com/copying-ideas-is-highly-underrat...
• digitalni 7y ago
  I have a history of taking on giants head on. Even I thought on so many occasions that what I was doing is insane and will never work, lo and behold, it did. Currently I am building a simplified windows deployment system (fdeploy.com) which already exists but is no longer available freely. I want to change that. My advice is: yes, do it. Give it a try, with most essential features and do not get lost in the details. Deliver something and see if people want it. Anything. The sooner the better.
• te_chris 7y ago
  I think a lot of people are missing the point about what actually makes a startup work in the early stages: a reliable and affordable route to customers. If you have this then go for it. If you don’t, then your real first step is to find this. Without this you won’t be able to compete.
• dusted 7y ago
  I usually loose inspiration when I've thought the idea through and concluded whether it could be done, and whether it could be successful. If I know how to build it, that's generally enough. Like The FinalKey, yes, I'm using it every day, and I'm very happy with it, and many of those I've given one are very happy with it, and can't understand that I didn't pursue it further.. Well, it was done! and now there is FIDO and Mooltipass, so it's not needed anymore anyway, so I get to move on to something else.
• epynonymous 7y ago
  never. i like how bill nguyen, founder of the color app, used to say, and i paraphrase, but he never cares about what other people have made, just focus on creating the best experience or something to that effect.
• 01100011 7y ago
  I realized a few years ago: You don't have to be the best. You just have to be better than some. You can always cannibalize the market share of the current worst performers. You get your start there, and build up as you can.
• dharma1 7y ago
  Who beat you to the reverse address book? I haven't seen a de facto option for this
• adrianbooth17 7y ago
  There are two reasons for building something: 1. Money 2. Fun / Learning Both have good reason for building something even though a similar product might exist. Mark Zuckerberg didn't look at MySpace and say "Oh well, there's already a social network where people can connect with each other. I'll stay in Harvard". He saw MySpace and said "I can do better". For the learning side, it's useful to build something despite its existence for gaining a greater appreciation for how that tool works. There's a service I've used before called Cloud66, which is essentially a wrapper for cloud services like AWS. I liked it so much I decided to build a clone just to see how it all works under the hood, and after replicating it I realised the underlying technologies used to achieve this are pretty simple. There's always good outcomes from building something, whether that be money, learning or just the joy of building something from nothing
• StreamBright 7y ago
  Absolutely not. Only if the thing exists already satisfies all my needs and I could not build a better version.
• reilly3000 7y ago
  I think your idea is fantastic. That doesn’t exist for me today; even if there is another solution out there, it hasn’t come to my attention, consideration, or adoption. I think the idea of a reverse address book could be generalized across many contexts. Tim Bernes-Lee is laying tracks for a protocol with that in mind, but it needs apps, especially ones that reach into where people store data today and migrate it to a network where people can subscribe to others data and publish their own. Meet me where I’m at: on an iPhone, with its contacts system and cloud. Give me shared data without making me relearn contact management over again. Make it so I can show my mom how to do it in a minute, or better yet so easy she doesn’t need to ask about it. Don’t wait for big tech to deliver this. Prove it’s possible.
  • rohan1024 7y ago
    Can you share more information about the protocol Tim is developing? Any Link? The idea sounds promising.
    • reilly3000 7y ago
      https://solid.inrupt.com/ https://solid.inrupt.com/
• Gehinnn 7y ago
  What is the name of the existing service? I am interested in trying it out :) I also once had the idea of a reverse address book but didn't think many people would use it.
• ludwigvan 7y ago
  There is a difference bt. building an app/software and building a business. If you enter a field with existing businesses, you have to treat it like a business, otherwise your app will generate zero revenue. Talking unfortunately from experience.
  • jcadam 7y ago
    I feel your pain. I spent a year building a SaaS and then another year trying to find customers. Never made a single sale. I realize now I approached the whole enterprise bass-ackwards. Next time: find customers first, then build the thing. If you can't find customers, then at least you haven't wasted time and energy building the thing. I know this is common wisdom now, but I apparently enjoy learning all of life's little lessons the hard way.
• est 7y ago
  > Zoom is a recent and great example of competing in a crowded market and winning. If you read Zoom's S1 filing, you will find they were profitable because they have their R&D in China.
• godzillabrennus 7y ago
  The saying: “Pioneers get arrows. Settlers take the land.” Basically represents that being first to market is not ideal. Out execute when the market is proven.
  • AstralStorm 7y ago
    There is always a new component to success. Facebook's was a social graph. Google's were big analytics. Uber's a new terrible business model. Microsoft's was coopting so many good ideas to build a software ecosystem. Apple was the same with hardware. And sometimes the space is just free for the taking, given strong enough budget. That's how DTP and CAD, electronics design and 3D graphics were almost duopolized. (And by better part libraries.) Sound and video editing are a bit more competitive, but not a lot.
• apatters 7y ago
  No, except in certain cases. When the market is large you can almost always carve out a stake. You already know the demand is there, you can get a share of it by reaching people who haven't heard of or don't like your competitor, or by doing something a little different and better. The risk and reward are both lower in these businesses vs a Valley style moonshot that VCs tend to like. However if the market is just a few companies or the service depends heavily on network effects I wouldn't do it. E.g. the investment required to offer as many apps as Google Play or as many social updates as Facebook is huge, you can't really bootstrap your way into this, and people are only going to engage with so many app stores or social networks.
• taneq 7y ago
  If you're just building an exact clone of something and not innovating, then no. If you see something and think it could be done much better, then you're not building the same thing. Go for it!
• AstralStorm 7y ago
  Usually it is the question of age. If it is just a few years, you might have a chance. If it's more than 20, you're probably either wrong about the potential or it's a really tough market requiring huge investment or paradigm change.
• amelius 7y ago
  This is a funny question because most successful open source software seems to be a clone of existing software. E.g. gimp/Photoshop, inkscape/Illustrator and libre office/office. Of course the nice part is that as an OSS developer, you don't have to think about the requirements and specification and even the UI of the software because that has already been done.
  • klntsky 7y ago
    > This is a funny question because most successful open source software seems to be a clone of existing software This is just wrong. None of the examples you mention are clones.
• yitchelle 7y ago
  I have similar feeling when I do my research and see my ideas all over Google search results. My strategy now becomes how do I _disrupt_ the incumbent. I take inspiration from Apple entering mp3 market, Uber entering the taxi market or Google entering the search market. Have not yet achieve success but will continue to try.
• ankit219 7y ago
  My $0.02. If you feel like the problem exists, start building. But, if you think the problem is solved, then it makes no sense to proceed with it. For a startup, people use your product because they have a problem to solve. It does not matter how bad your UI/UX is, how drastically bad your flows are, if you are offering a solution no one else is, you will have users. It just needs to work. The more pertinent the problem, more the users will be annoyed if it does not work. Ideally, your idea should be one of the solutions to the problem, and the entire initial phase is there to establish two things: 1/ Whether your solution works? Can you find a unique solution for the problem? 2/ Do a lot of people really have that problem? For example: If you want to get into ridesharing and taxi market today, it will be difficult. But there is an open case where the wait times and variability annoys a lot of people. That is, if I am taking an Uber, I dont know how long will I need to wait. The app says 5 mins, but can be anywhere between 5-15 depending on the match. Sometimes, I have waited for >10 min and the driver cancelled and had to wait another 15. If some app can tell me exact time - or even let me schedule a ride - I would be happy to pay extra for that given it saves me the time and frustration. Not sure how many will have the problem, or it is good enough for others, but I will prefer a cab which allows me exactly this - even at a higher price point.
  • narag 7y ago
    For a startup, people use your product because they have a problem to solve. It does not matter how bad your UI/UX is, how drastically bad your flows are, if you are offering a solution no one else is, you will have users. It just needs to work. It's funny because I came to the same conclusion years ago, but had not written it until yesterday in a different context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19770812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19770812 Great minds think alike :)
    • ankit219 7y ago
      True that. Great minds really do think alike :) I came to the conclusion the hard way when I focused on UI/UX (it should look good) instead of focusing on providing the best possible solution. This is the most important learning I took from the entire entrepreneurial experience.
• homero 7y ago
  There is no competition, only execution. Dropbox had been done before. I remember something called X drive like a decade prior but it was no Dropbox. And still no one does what they do. Google drive has yet to have a desktop client that does anything like it.
• jamesmkenny 7y ago
  It doesn't put me off, but makes me more cautious. I need to put more effort and focus on what makes my product different to the competition. That clarity can really help push your product forward in a crowded market. I also feel that doing 1 thing and doing it well or better at launch can really help.
• crazygorilla 7y ago
  Sometime its just a single feature that makes a difference. There are tons of news aggregators out there but I decided to build my own anyways, because it updates the website automatically without that I have to scroll. After I build it I realized that I use it as a "second-screen website" where the news just runs over the site like a ticker. I don't have a lot of visitors, but the ones that come stay for a long time, that is great! http://www.uptopnews.com/ http://www.uptopnews.com/
• _Understated_ 7y ago
  Any time I am talking to younger entrepreneurs about ideas they have that already exist in some fashion I give them a simple analogy to ponder over: Rice! I tell them to take a look at the rice isle in the supermarket and ask themselves "why are there so many varieties of rice?"... it's rice for goodness sake! How can one be different to another? How can there possibly be a need for hundreds of different types of rice. Even if you just pick one type, like white rice, there are multiple brands competing with something as simple as rice. Every item on a supermarket shelf has earned the right to be there because people are buying it for different reasons. Everyone is different: Some people only buy Uncle Ben's rice at 4 times the price of the supermarket rice and others only touch the unbranded value rice. It's all marketing. So if your idea already exists then it means there is probably a demand and you just need to find your angle and market it appropriately.
• AstralStorm 7y ago
  By the way, if your idea is Facebook you're 20 years too late. (Facebook is a reverse address book.)
• mapcars 7y ago
  The trick is what you are building can not exist, something similar can, but not _it_.
• mrich 7y ago
  The longer you are in the industry, the more you realize that things repeat and the only thing that matters is getting some market share and growing your business. This can happen in a number of ways - perhaps a beautiful UI, network effects, lower costs, or a new technology platform (web) that shakes up existing markets. So it happens all the time, you just need to find the right angle to best the incumbents.
• VvR-Ox 7y ago
  Not necessarily. Overall: Look at all these products that have nearly identical features (with only some distinction). The key is to think about the features that would make your product unique and to analyze whether there is people who will prefer your product (at your price point) to all the other options. I'd love to bring something innovative to the market but it really isn't necessary. A lot of people focus on things that a lot of other people don't care about or like. So it's easy to get a decent market share with basically already existing products that just provide some "buy-worthy" features. Of course competition can be harder here but on the other hand you don't have to put that much effort into building something completely new (which will give others the opportunity to improve upon your great idea). It's also easier to analyze an already existing market.
• Kiro 7y ago
  I only build things I actually want to use myself. If I, after research, find that my idea has already been done it simply means that there's an untapped market where either their product sucks or they're bad at marketing. Otherwise I would have already have known about them and I shouldn't need to do research to find it.
• sbov 7y ago
  I work for a small company that is always trying out new projects. Most of them are ideas that already exist out there, but we feel the current solutions are lacking in some major way.
• tluyben2 7y ago
  If there are no competitors I generally worry far more than if it exists. I have built many things that do not exist and found out why they do not exist; there is no (sustainable) market (even though we did some research which showed enough market, but turned out there was not or at least not enough to reach that market with limited/bootstrapped means). I have also built many products into (we then thought) saturated markets (dating, free hosting, ...) which did well for us.
• dsgriffin 7y ago
  Not so much about something already existing, but knowing how next-to-impossible it'll be to compete against the Googles/Microsofts of the world once the idea starts to take up steam/get noticed.
• bitxbit 7y ago
  I have put off an idea because it’s not technologically feasible yet. However, that’s given me years of tinkering with the same idea in my mind, therapeutic to some extent.
• cjblomqvist 7y ago
  In my opinion... It's quite established how to answer this question. More specifically, it's a classic strategy question (with a lot of marketing in it). You should look up what broad theory is applicable. My take (have an MBA or equivalent) is to look at differentiation, segmentation, resource based strategy, feedback loops and platform theory, Porter's five forces with critique, a static VS a dynamic perspective. If you can find a viable (hopefully quite sustainable) strategy, go for it. If you can't, then don't.
  • apkallum 7y ago
    Would you be kind enough to point to resources where one could learn more about this?
• lioeters 7y ago
  There's a large company (30000~ employees, market cap "north of $3 billion") called Rocket Internet [0], based mostly (solely?) on the business strategy of building something that already exists. Seeing how successful they are, it seems the "uniqueness of a product/service idea" is not such an important factor as it's commonly considered. Perhaps it's more about the execution, how the idea is implemented - UX, marketing, etc. [0] https://thehustle.co/rocket-internet-oliver-samwer https://thehustle.co/rocket-internet-oliver-samwer
  • Etheryte 7y ago
    Worth mentioning that they only work in a very specific niche — e-commerce sites. That's literally the only thing they do, although admittedly very well.
• iagooar 7y ago
  Everything exists by now. Every single idea that you might have has been tried already. Your next startup is not going to be the first doing what it does. Believe me: it’s not the idea that makes a great project / company. It’s the execution. It’s the market fit. It’s providing the best solution possible. It’s delighting your customers. It’s giving them real value for their money.
• no_plebs 7y ago
  It all depends on how it's being done. As they say, no idea is original. If you have one that is, go for it. Otherwise take a preexisting idea and make it yours. Do it in a way that's never been done before.
• jtraffic 7y ago
  1. Your idea is probably not identical. You execution almost certainly won't be. 2. There is usually room to compete. 3. Innovations often take root slowly and need a network of collaborators and competitors to nurture them.
• fiatjaf 7y ago
  Well, Zoom had probably tons of funding.
• redact207 7y ago
  Some great advice here. To add another perspective: sometimes you don't know where your idea will take you. A lot of your competition is locked into their path. Being at the outset of yours, the customers you listen to along the way may steer you in a different direction or pivot into a far better idea.
• GoblinSlayer 7y ago
  Usually only an alternative exists, not exactly what I do. FWIW I steal ideas from other people for my projects.
• cy6erlion 7y ago
  A musician doesn't stop writing a love song just because there are millions of love songs already written.
• biztos 7y ago
  I had, or I guess still have, an idea for Yet Another Web Framework. I've written four versions of it in three languages already. I kept running into a problem: if it was complex enough to realize my full vision, then I wouldn't have time to maintain it, especially if it got any traction at all. Plus, for each single thing I wanted it to do, there were pretty well established things you could use instead. I enjoyed programming it as a learning experience and to scratch my own itch. But I eventually decided it would actually be harder to maintain the system than to write a dumb little web app for any given project. And that there were probably much more valuable things I could teach myself than My Excentric Web Framework. On another front, while I have never written any code for it, I keep thinking it would be cool to have GeoCities back but updated for all the cool stupid things you can do in the modern Web. A place for your weird taste in CSS, in public, with no shame and open to all. But I keep wishing somebody else would do it, which is not exactly the thing you asked about but somewhat close.
  • rlopezcc 7y ago
    > GeoCities back but updated for all the cool stupid things you can do in the modern Web. A place for your weird taste in CSS, in public Sounds like Neocities
    • biztos 7y ago
      Oh yeah, I had forgotten about NeoCities, though I did know about them at some point! Thanks for the tip.
  • mk4p 7y ago
    I think someone else did it: https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
    • biztos 7y ago
      Indeed! And probably much truer to the original than I would have done. I wonder if there is room for multiple flavors of this idea. IIRC somebody had something similar that was text-only a while back. I suspect the Faceborg has let so much air out of the Web that there might not be, but I love the idea that at least in principle anybody with $5/mo for a server could create a *Cities tuned to their own preferences, and people might show up and participate. All free and in the open.
• aitchnyu 7y ago
  I know a VCS service and a support tool that could let you steal their lunch. Both are lumbering giants under their current owners and have not innovated for years. If its lean they could beat you on execution. If its riddled with bloat and the good engineers have left, you could win.
• bluedino 7y ago
  If you are put off, it's a good sign you shouldn't even try to build it. If you're discouraged that easily, you aren't going to have the desire or drive to stick with it. Let's go back in time 20-25 years. I was a wannabe game programmer, and every few months I'd get a stick up my ass to write a Doom clone, RTS, or whatever game I was playing at the time. I'd recruit a buddy or two from a chat room or messageboard. Even though whatever game was out there (Quake II, AoE) was amazing and something we'd never come close to, we'd start methodically planning out the game, star writing an engine, have some test art created...you couldn't stop us. At least not at the start. Eventually we'd get distracted and go our seperate ways, but we still worked on the project like it was the most important thing in our lives for 2-3 months. Back to today. I wanted to make a chess website, just something simple where you could login and play a game with other users. Mostly so my dad and I could play without being in the same room. I wrote a simple web-based chess engine, got about 75% of the way to what I would consider a 'completed' project. Then I went to chess.com. Now, I wasn't planning on making something even close to that. No chat rooms, blogs, rankings...but seeing all the features on the site just sucked every last drop of motiviation I had. It didn't help that my current site was basically playable and didn't need much more work. But from that point one, every time I opened my project it just felt so futile. I know that products evolve over time, and whatever Chess.com looked like in it's first revision probably wasn't anything special. But it's like I knew that I would never even want to take it to that level, so I just lost every drop of motiviation I had at that point.
• cik 7y ago
  I'm not put off at all - though I guess it depends on your goal? I want to play with a couple of new languages. To do so, I'm taking a problem that's already solved today (not in a way I love) and writing yet another entrant. My goal is learning, not profit.
• bmaupin 7y ago
  "Being first to do something is unimportant. Being best is what counts." (https://www.theverge.com/2015/3/13/8202873/first-doesnt-matter https://www.theverge.com/2015/3/13/8202873/first-doesnt-matt...)
• rossenberg79 7y ago
  I always tell people there is no point in worrying about whether or not someone has already started building your idea first, what you should worry about is the person who will come after you with your same idea, but better.
• ScottFree 7y ago
  Just out of curiosity, is anybody here looking to create a new consumer operating system to compete with Windows and Mac? I'd like to, but I have no idea where to start. Talk about putting it off because something already exists! :)
  • sah2ed 7y ago
    You conveniently left out Linux, why :)? Linus Torvalds recently did an interview [0], where he talked about, amongst other things, just how hard it is to get an OS off the ground. Excerpt: “I used to think that some radical new and exciting OS would come around and supplant Linux some day (hey, back in 1994 I probably still thought that maybe Hurd would do it!), but it's not just that we've been doing this for a long time and are still doing very well, I've also come to realize that making a new operating system is just way harder than I ever thought. It really takes a lot of effort by a lot of people, and the strength of Linux—and open source in general, of course—is very much that you can build on top of the effort of all those other people. So unless there is some absolutely enormous shift in the computing landscape, I think Linux will be doing quite well another quarter century from now.” 0: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/25-years-later-interview-linus-torvalds https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/25-years-later-intervie...
    • ScottFree 7y ago
      Linux is not, nor has it ever been, a valid consumer operating system. Ever year has supposedly been the year of the linux desktop since 1998 (21 years!). Maybe it's time to give up the hope that Linux will ever challenge Windows or MacOS on the Desktop.
      • sah2ed 7y ago
        > Linux is not, nor has it ever been, a valid consumer operating system. I disagree with your assertion since it wasn’t properly qualified. Linux is indeed a valid consumer OS but it has never been a mainstream OS on the desktop. In spite of that, it has become a mainstream consumer OS on mobile, in the form of Android. Anyway, the original point of my reply was to highlight just how involved building a new OS from scratch is, relative to other software projects you could work on. Add to that the unlikelihood of ever seeing a pay off for the amount of resources that would need to be committed to such an endeavor, unless you are under a big tech company.
• jshowa3 7y ago
  Build it anyways. Who cares if there's competition. The point is, would you be better if you did build it? 99% of the time, it would be a yes. Even if it didn't pass market.
• cambaceres 7y ago
  I've been working on a project for the last 6 months, and this week the company will be founded. When I came up with the idea I barely googled it, I just assumed that if it existed I would know about it. A few weeks ago however, I found out that a version of the system I'm building exists already. After the initial negative response I started to carefully examine my competitor's solution, and the more I look at it, the more I'm convinsed that our system will outperform it big time. They apparently have technical problems which has stopped them from capturing market shares in the past 6 months. If I would have found out about this other company 6 months ago, I would have never started working on the project. Thank god I did though. I have learned so much about web and app development, I have expanded the idea of what I'm capable of, I'm about to found a company (which of course anyone can do but feels super exiting for me :D ) and I actually have a shot at making it fly. It is always better to do something than nothing.
• dsalzman 7y ago
  This reminds me of an old blog of mine. "The culture of Googling everything is diminishing innovation and critical thinking." Person A: "I have this great Idea!" Person B: "What is it?" Person A: "Well its ______ for ______!. Isn't that awesome" Person B: (Quickly googles on his phone) "There are already X companies doing exactly that" Person A: "Ohhh..."(Drops his head in shame and moves on" The most innovative ideas were mostly created by multiple people independently and not knowingly. Do the lowered barriers to knowledge reduce our ability for critical thinking? How can we maximize the inherent benefits of the web; while minimizing these negative 2nd order effects? https://dannysalzman.com/second-order-google-effect/ https://dannysalzman.com/second-order-google-effect/
  • humblebee 7y ago
    I use to work with a friend from high school on a lot of side projects. He was entrepreneur, and I was just a hacker. I'd generally share all my random ideas with him because I just wanted to talk through the idea with someone and he was generally the only person who would be interested at all in any of my ideas. However, he commonly would come back with a google search and saying "It's that just X". He was very focused on how can an idea be monetized, and all I cared about was how I could build it / how it works. The flip side of that is as soon as I figured something out I moved on, which lead to many half baked projects that I never got to completion. Once I figured out how something worked or how to solve a problem I lost interest in the idea almost completely and moved onto the next thing. I still haven't completely figured out how to frame thing in a way to avoid this. The best way I know how to do it is to over shoot the idea most of the time. The issue is this doesn't work very well when working within a team.
    • dsalzman 7y ago
      I don't think you have a problem at all. You just need a partner who enjoys the money making side as much as you love to create and work together.
• tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
  I've developed a few ideas that I would love to work on, but I'm extremely pessimistic about business ventures. If anything remotely similar to my idea exists, I assume that they've considered my idea and there's something I'm missing. Like there's some reason it wouldn't work the way I'm imagining, and I'd fail. So yeah, I tend to quit unless the idea is super unique.
• JohnFen 7y ago
  > 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? I take on projects (both commercial and hobby) that satisfy a need that isn't already being adequately addressed elsewhere. I don't care much if a product of the same sort already exists. I only care that it isn't adequately meeting a need. In fact, if I've come up with an idea and find that nothing like it already exists, I consider that a red flag. Not a showstopper, but a reason to be much more cautious. This is because it often happens that if nobody else is addressing a given market, it's because there's some serious problem in addressing that market that I haven't foreseen (perhaps it isn't as big as I think, or there is some technical gotcha that I didn't notice, etc.)
• apolymath 7y ago
  Nope! I found a success story on HN and now I'm stealing their idea and making it better, because I see a barely tapped market that deserves a better product.
  • wayoverthecloud 7y ago
    Wanna collaborate?
• tombert 7y ago
  I actually started on a project recently because a competing product already exists. I really dislike Emby and Plex server (I don't want to besmirch them here but you can email me if you want a rant :) ), and as a result I've been working on/off on a product to replace them. I probably won't monetize it any time soon, but it's not off the table honestly, since I personally feel that my system will be better. Even if it's not, I had a lot of fun making it.
• newsoul2019 7y ago
  I have no problem coming up with ideas but what I need is a rock-solid, dead-simple CRUD stack that ONE person alone can run, securely, in their spare time.
• HelloFellowDevs 7y ago
  I had an idea, that I was going to implement over the month of May as soon as I finished my internship. I was very excited, I wrote up a pitch and mapped out the infrastructure. I just hadn't written code yet, I was saving that for when I could just write code for myself in May. This weekend someone else launched it. It's not as if I was thinking that my idea was novel, I just didn't think anyone else would get onto it let alone 'beat' me to market. I can still work on that idea for sure, but it really took the wind out of my sails. Here's Overcast with Clip Sharing[0] [0] https://marco.org/2019/04/27/overcast-clip-sharing https://marco.org/2019/04/27/overcast-clip-sharing
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• Can_Not 7y ago
  My inspiration for creating things may often not be "let's make X exist", but rather "like X, but good". I make PWAs and APIs, so unfortunately making a better Civilization V or a slack that performs like AIM isn't going to fit in my schedule. What puts me off is usually the lack of a usable API. Or, if closed source app X has a gorilla that's holding the banana wrong, I might have to recreate the entire jungle from scratch just to get some basic architectural or UX flow fixed.
• dennisgorelik 7y ago
  At the end of 2006 I decided to build a job search aggregator. After 2 months of developing a prototype I found out that indeed.com and simplyhired.com already implemented job aggregators for ~2 years. So, instead of continuing with job aggregator - I decided to build a job board (postjobfree.com) My job board grew OK, because indeed.com and simplyhired.com sent us organic (free) traffic for couple of years. But then (~2009) Indeed and Simplyhired started to charge job boards money for the traffic, and then refused to send even paid traffic to job boards (~2012). In addition to that, Japanese "Recruit" holding bought Indeed in 2012 (for $1.2B). Then "Recruit" bought Simplyhired (2016). Then "Recruit" bought Glassdoor in 2018 (for another $1.2B). Glassdoor worked as a job aggregator as well. So now largest job aggregator companies convert from "job aggregator" model to "job board" model where customers are direct employers and not other job boards. So few years ago I started to transform my job board business into job aggregator again. I think if I never abandoned job aggregator idea in the first place, my business, probably, would be a little bit more successful by now. However it is hard to tell for sure. I could have given up competing against Indeed and SimplyHired back in 2007-2012.
  • vpatryshev 7y ago
    An impressive story. As I understand it, you did it more or less singlehandedly.
    • dennisgorelik 7y ago
      As a single founder - yes, but not singlehandedly. I always used help from employees. Initially part-time, then full-time, then more than one employee/contractor.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• Ozzie_osman 7y ago
  Zoom is not a typical example. In this case the founder already knew the space and product really well. Eric Yuan was VP for webex at Cisco and hence already knew the market, had the contacts, and understood what was holding webex back as a product.
• mariatechmaniac 7y ago
  Have you thought of 'joining' the competition? We were somehow conditioned to believe that we either have to be the Founder or nothing. We are not losers if we are employees and not employers. We don't have to be the CEO to pursue an idea we are passionate about. And if it is impact that you want; think that most often, the impact you can have joining an existing successful company will be waay bigger than reinventing the wheel and building your own. I do respect the nobility of wanting to be your own boss and doing your own awesome thing but in general(not giving advice for this specific case), that's not the only way..
• intenscia 7y ago
  16 years ago I created a database for video game mods and led the market. Now I’m in the opposite position where services like Steam’s Workshop have taken over. Despite that my conviction that mods are critically important has never waivered, and alternatives / competition is required. So now I’m the upstart and it feels good to be building something I’m passionate about and believe in, despite the 200 ton gorilla in the room. We both serve slightly different roles, developers using our tech love what we are creating and I’m confident we can carve out a worthwhile piece of the pie. Long story short I’m glad this is a rule I broke and didn’t let my inspiration evaporate.
• raj_khare 7y ago
  Myspace existed before Facebook