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> Big companies can copy your product in no time Your advantage in this case, now or 10 years ago, is that this is simply not true. If your business is "a fla
by artyom 9mo ago
> Big companies can copy your product in no time
Your advantage in this case, now or 10 years ago, is that this is simply not true.
If your business is "a flashlight app", yeah, eventually they'll copy it (as it happened). However they'll take an unusual long time to do that simple thing (as it also happened).
Why? Because everything at big companies is a political game, full of internal conflicts, multiple priorities, non-collaborative teams, self-interest, promotion games, and a bunch of other things not really related to build the thing in question. It very rarely has anything to do with how fast the code can be written.
If your business is good enough and becomes something more than "a piece of software", and solves a problem, becomes a brand, has great user feedback... that's not something you can "copy in no time".
- robofanatic 9mo agoWhat about other smart guys looking for ideas for their startup?
- artyom 9mo agoSame as 10 years ago, unrelated to how fast it can be copied.
- Oras 9mo agoWhile I agree with sone of your points, there are many evidences that this happened in the past. One example is Microsoft creating teams to take on Slack.
- AbstractH24 9mo agoI dont think the founders or early team at slack are upset with how things played out
- Sevii 9mo agoJust the consumers unfortunately.
- ctkhn 9mo agoTeams is still nowhere near Slack's features and usefulness. I wouldn't say it's a direct competitor, it's like store brand vs a mid-luxury item
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- musicale 9mo agoNobody really likes Teams, but it does seem to have more features than Slack in terms of integration with the rest of Microsoft's office software ecosystem. It's nice to be able to open up and edit Word/PowerPoint/Excel documents directly, view the Outlook calendar directly, etc. It is also integrated with SharePoint and OneDrive for file storage. Teams had video calls before Slack as well IIRC. Teams, Slack and Discord all seem to be built as clunky web apps; but my experience is that Discord seems to work slightly better than Slack, which in turn works slightly better than Teams.
- KellyCriterion 9mo agothe thing is: TEAMS just works, even for all office drones who cant use a computer without accidents
- hactually 9mo agoI can't get it to work. I have to use an incognito window or it just craps itself. Terrible software for mediocre companies.
- KellyCriterion 9mo agoWell, since you are on HN you are quite above the maximum level of experience allowed to use TEAMS without hassle :-D
- 9rx 9mo agoIf, knowing what you know now, you could go back in time and be the one to create Slack would you not do it? Even if everyone is using Teams now (they're not), it took a really long time to show up that Slack's founders were able to capitalize on. The change in the software landscape today is the apparent ability to develop a competitor faster thanks to LLMs. But, as the parent points out, the bottleneck was never code writing. It was waiting on the people involved to get past their egos. LLMs have done nothing to change that.
- atonse 9mo agoEvery single org I’ve seen using teams (sample size of 4-5 orgs) uses it because it came for free. And every one of them also got slack and paid for it. That says everything about how shitty Teams STILL is. MS still hasn’t improved it much from the steady state turd that it’s been a few years ago.
- dangus 9mo agoIt’s so funny. My company is basically merger hell and we have both Teams and Slack for similar reasons. One of the more important acquired companies with a cash cow product basically refused to move to Teams because they hate it and concocted a reason that we just had to keep it. The reason was total BS but it was crafted to appeal to the higher-ups, and it worked, because nobody was really going to fight over less than ten bucks per person per month.
- pankajdoharey 9mo agoDon’t worry big companies still can’t copy anything quickly, even with AI. Why? Because before they can ship a single feature, they’ll need to schedule 42 alignment meetings, debate AI-generated slide decks, and log their “strategic pivots” into an AI-curated Jira board. The real moat isn’t just code it’s speed, focus, user trust, and the ability to actually ship. Those are things bloated orgs struggle with, with or without AI. If you’re solving a real problem and building a real brand, you’re already ahead.
- _bypa 9mo agoThe real moat is not being forced to use Jira then.
- raw_anon_1111 9mo agoI don’t do side projects related to computers and never have in 30 years. But I still use a Trello board to keep myself organized
- pants2 9mo agoIronically I use a vibe-coded Trello clone with some tweaks for my specific workflow...
- nextaccountic 9mo agoCare to share those tweaks?
- awakeasleep 9mo agoThat’s not even it, because in the small company jira won’t be such an oppressive system.
- KellyCriterion 9mo agoa) THe only problem with Jira is that its soooo slow :-) b) give Linear.App a chance - its great
- therobots927 9mo agoI couldn’t agree more. In fact I think the exact opposite of the original statement might be true: Find a product made by a big corporation that is a great concept but has clearly suffered from an internal shitshow of a team for some time, and copy it. If other corporations are sloppily copying it - even better. That just means the product has actual market fit.
- raw_anon_1111 9mo agoThat’s a whole lot of ifs. At the end of this long road filled with if’s, what are the chances that he can have a profit large enough to overcome the opportunity cost of not just working as an enterprise dev in a 2nd tier city and have continuing profits or have a meaningful exit?