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Unlike regular businesses, software scales infinitely and delivers immediately. You absolutely must have a "unique" selling point, even if it's just being chea

Unlike regular businesses, software scales infinitely and delivers immediately. You absolutely must have a "unique" selling point, even if it's just being cheaper. Otherwise, your competitors are just a click away. I'd argue the author HAS found PMF, just not the kind that gets you to $1b.

yao420 2y ago
Literally every software I have ever used or company I worked for has had multiple competitors doing the exact same thing.
- billllll 2y ago
  I really doubt "literally" every software you used or worked for has multiple competitors doing the "exact" same thing. VC money can temporarily prop up multiple competitors doing the same thing, but over time, winners definitely spring up. A lot of software that on the surface does the "exact same thing" often has different nuances, either to the business or the product that makes them appeal to different niches in the market. Understanding the nuances and exploiting the market niche is your only goal when starting a business. It's not something you ever do or think about when working on software, but people who strike it out on their own quickly realize that simply building is not enough, you MUST give people a good reason to use your software. Just because you don't see or understand the nuances, does not mean they are not there.
  - yao420 2y ago
    I can’t think of a single software that does not have fierce competition. Just today, YouTube, slack, chrome, Claude, burpsuite, interm, obsidian, nest, outlook, Zillow, AWS, cloudflare,GitHub, Roborock, jetbrains. They could all be replaced and do 90% of the job immediately and a week later figure out the last 10%. As as for work, coinbase is not the only exchange, square is one of many, meta is another social media site.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
xiaoape 2y ago
> You absolutely must have a "unique" selling point, even if it's just being cheaper. I don't think you have to have a unique selling point all the times. You can make an exact product as the market leader and layer on top a distribution that you own or you sell the product to a underserved groups. It will work too. In fact, this way of doing business happens a lot to non software products.
p1necone 2y ago
> Unlike regular businesses, software scales infinitely and delivers immediately. In theory? Maybe. In reality? Your scale and delivery depend on the competence of your devs and your processes and there's a very good chance you could do it better than all the big companies from your garage as a solo dev if it has a relatively small feature set.

yao420 2y ago

Literally every software I have ever used or company I worked for has had multiple competitors doing the exact same thing.

billllll 2y ago
I really doubt "literally" every software you used or worked for has multiple competitors doing the "exact" same thing. VC money can temporarily prop up multiple competitors doing the same thing, but over time, winners definitely spring up. A lot of software that on the surface does the "exact same thing" often has different nuances, either to the business or the product that makes them appeal to different niches in the market. Understanding the nuances and exploiting the market niche is your only goal when starting a business. It's not something you ever do or think about when working on software, but people who strike it out on their own quickly realize that simply building is not enough, you MUST give people a good reason to use your software. Just because you don't see or understand the nuances, does not mean they are not there.
- yao420 2y ago
  I can’t think of a single software that does not have fierce competition. Just today, YouTube, slack, chrome, Claude, burpsuite, interm, obsidian, nest, outlook, Zillow, AWS, cloudflare,GitHub, Roborock, jetbrains. They could all be replaced and do 90% of the job immediately and a week later figure out the last 10%. As as for work, coinbase is not the only exchange, square is one of many, meta is another social media site.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

xiaoape 2y ago

> You absolutely must have a "unique" selling point, even if it's just being cheaper. I don't think you have to have a unique selling point all the times. You can make an exact product as the market leader and layer on top a distribution that you own or you sell the product to a underserved groups. It will work too. In fact, this way of doing business happens a lot to non software products.

p1necone 2y ago

> Unlike regular businesses, software scales infinitely and delivers immediately. In theory? Maybe. In reality? Your scale and delivery depend on the competence of your devs and your processes and there's a very good chance you could do it better than all the big companies from your garage as a solo dev if it has a relatively small feature set.