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Ask HN: How do you find out if your idea is new?
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you find out if your idea is new?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I really don't want to do is lose a month implementing something and then realize that there was already something fairly popular out there that solved it. I would rather not get too attached to my own ideas and tunnel vision implement them and ignore the reality that if there's already a good app for that I shouldn't bother.
You should have this in mind: Facebook was not the first social network, google was not the first search engine, amazon was not the first marketplace. So think of the market whether there is room for some more improvements and/or the market is huge enough to have more than one similar products. How can you solve the shortcomings of the similar product and be different.
Following this point, I think that it probably exist (at least others people had the idea for sure, most probably didn't do anything with it, most likely for the same reason you don't), but if it's not big enough for you to know they exist, you're free to go imo.
Facebook was not the first social network, however if you want to make a facebook clone today you may aswell throw your money right away and save your time.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find out if your idea is new?
#13If you can't find a solution, potential customers can't find one either.
Even if you do find one, competition is validation of the idea. A common misconception in "startups" is that an idea has to be new to be valid. In fact some of the best startups applied new models to existing ideas with very competitive markets.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find out if your idea is new?
#14I'd argue that it doesn't matter if your idea is new or not. It only matters if it is executed better. Think of some of the battery tech that is happening now, they are literally taking battery tech invented in the 1800's and adding today's technology and chemistry knowledge to make it better and more cost effective. So their idea isn't new, but hopefully their ability to execute is superior.
So in the end, I'd worry less about if your idea is new, and more about can you do it so that you have a market wanting to pay you for it. Somehow you have to monetize, so if you can answer how it makes money and have validated that with real people willing to pay for it, then just do it and screw whether its new or not.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find out if your idea is new?
#15Easy: It's not.
Having said that - there are billions of dollars to be made in simplifying existing implementations of existing ideas.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find out if your idea is new?
#16You don't. In the grand scheme of things, it's probably a small minority of people that go public (i.e. publicly posting on the Internet) with their ideas for an app or business. To answer your question in terms of code projects, I tend to turn to GitHub. More often than not, if I'm trying to build something and I've hit a problem a few selective searches through the code section will bring up something similar. It m…
What I really don't want to do is lose a month implementing something and then realize that there was already something fairly popular out there that solved it. I would rather not get too attached to my own ideas and tunnel vision implement them and ignore the reality that if there's already a good app for that I shouldn't bother.
Echoing the other comments, think of it not as a missed opportunity, but as a challenge to build something better than what already exists. The odds are that anything you've worked on has (probably) already been done.