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

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

#131

Post by klntsky »

amelius wrote: post #129

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.

> 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.

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

#132

Post by guiriduro »

dusted wrote: post #100
halter73 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Didn't IBM do a programming language like that once? They found out, that most times, people don't actually know what they want, or how to explain it in a way that only have one or two perfectly valid interpretations.

SQL? That's an interesting case. It sits at the nexus of a well-defined relational theory, Codd et al., and normalised table data, and you can only ask it things which make sense like selection, projection and various joins. To the question of intentionality, it is declarative and does hide a lot of the work of arriving at the requested result.

Perhaps when viewed in the context of a more tightly defined problem set and solution space, and allowing for the advances in algorithms, AI and computing power since the 1970's - DNNs, evolutionary algos, backpropagation, annealing etc. -intentional goal-seeking self-programming should at least be conceivable.

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

#133

Post by yitchelle »

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.

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

#134

Post by ankit219 »

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.

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

#135

Post by SyneRyder »

AstralStorm wrote: post #124
SyneRyder wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, if the features are identical, then the price can be different. Just a reminder that pricing "cheaper" isn't always a good idea. Newbies often think they'll charge less, but without having the data competitors have of how long the product takes to develop & maintain, how much support is involved, how much advertising costs to acquire a customer, how often you need to upgrade your equipment etc. Please…

Can't beat "free" on price which is why Google is so terrible to compete against.

Sometimes you can beat free! You can outlive the free / freeware competitors, because they're often not making money!

Remember Google often kills off their services. They bought Picasa & the Nik Photography Collection & made them both available for free... now Picasa is gone (even though there's a ton of customers who still want it), and Google sold the Nik Collection to DxO and it's back to costing $70 again. And Fastmail exists even though Gmail is free.

Google is not known for providing friendly personal customer service... so why not aim to get your customers saying "yeah XYZ costs more, but oh my god, they have the friendliest & most hilarious people answering their emails, and they actually fixed my problem!" You can only do that if you've got money coming in to pay for the support team (you want to pay your employees well too, right?) Derek Sivers has some great ideas on doing awesome customer service:

https://sivers.org/cs

(Anyway, just some food for thought. Sometimes pricing cheap is absolutely the right thing, sometimes Charge More is the right thing. Experiment with both!)

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

#136

Post by homero »

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.

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

#137

Post by majewsky »

dx034 wrote: post #73
sheetjs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worth noting the downside of scale: some opportunities are "too small" for a Microsoft or Google to pursue. Google revenue for 2018 was $136.8B. Extra effort to possibly address a small niche segment of a market, that would improve revenue by $1M per year, is too small to draw anyone's attention. However, that same $1M/yr is enough to sustain a bootstrapped business and even possibly build the credibility to rai…

> However, that same $1M/yr is enough to sustain a bootstrapped business and even possibly build the credibility to raise a larger round and try to win the space. And often, $1M/yr is not even needed. Many developers don't necessarily want to become managers and worry about funding rounds, hiring, etc. $1M/yr is already a pretty good lifestyle, no need to get further funding or scale the business if you're happy runn…

FWIW, @sheetjs took that $1M/yr to be revenue, so your profits are going to be smaller than that.

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

#138

Post by majewsky »

planb wrote: post #90
nexuist wrote: post #16

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 decad…

You restaurant analogy fails, because restaurants are at a fixed physical location and the seats are constrained. I find Ben Thompson's "Aggregation Theory" quite insightful on this topic: https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/ That's not to say that you cannot be successfull running a small service, but it needs to be differentiated in some way and not just copy the existing ones (which works fine for a ch…

Exactly. Those restaurants differentiate on physical location, not on the feature set.

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

#139

Post by avichalp »

blacksoil wrote: post #29
karterk wrote: post #3

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 en…

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.

There are few Rust based projects now for Full Text Search. So you can move away from JVM.

- https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic

- https://github.com/toshi-search/Toshi

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

#140

Post by dwg »

kristopolous wrote: post #58
nexuist wrote: post #16

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 decad…

Google entered a "mature and settled" search market in 1998. Just do it

Google brought to market a unique and powerful approach to getting the most relevant content to the top of the search results: PageRank. It was a good solution to a big problem with search engines at that time, and the difference in quality of results was obvious.
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