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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?

#161

Post by vsk »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #48
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…

I don't think this is a super helpful comparison. There is a net demand for Chinese food in the area, and there will definitely be such a thing as 'too much or little' supply (though obviously each offer i.e. supply is a little different) A single restaurant will only be able to meet so much demand, so if there's a niche in terms of region or menu, maybe there's a real opportunity. GitHub, Uber, FB - they all have ne…

Google won against Yahoo and Altavista, Facebook won against MySpace, StackOverflow against ExpertsExchange.

One thing that the losers have in common is that their execution was not good enough (or outright bad in the case of ExpertsExchange).

But Altavista was huge when Google started. AOL had network effects that did not help them, so it is absolutely not clear that it is impossible.

People however are more lethargic and programmed by their mobile devices these days, so it may be more difficult now.

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

#162

Post by Kiro »

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.

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

#163

Post by [deleted] »

welly wrote: post #142
planb wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's fair but how about streets in any big city or town (certainly in the UK) where there is fried chicken shop after fried chicken shop after kebab shop after another kebab shop? The only thing that differentiates each of those places are usually the logos and the name of the shop (London Fried Chicken, Tasty Fried Chicken, Hackney Fried Chicken etc. - not a great deal of imagination there). The food is almost ide…

[deleted]

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

#164

Post by rahimnathwani »

welly wrote: post #142
planb wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's fair but how about streets in any big city or town (certainly in the UK) where there is fried chicken shop after fried chicken shop after kebab shop after another kebab shop? The only thing that differentiates each of those places are usually the logos and the name of the shop (London Fried Chicken, Tasty Fried Chicken, Hackney Fried Chicken etc. - not a great deal of imagination there). The food is almost ide…

Multiple shops like this can survive because each has limited capacity, i.e. these two go up exponentially after a certain (quite early) point:

1. Time between walking in and paying.

2. Time between paying and receiving your food.

If one of those restaurants could maintain quality, and keep the above two metrics flat whilst a scaling to 4x, then the other 3 restaurants would lose business and eventually go out of business.

Online businesses don't usually have the same limits to scale.

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

#165

Post by philbarr »

welly wrote: post #142
planb wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's fair but how about streets in any big city or town (certainly in the UK) where there is fried chicken shop after fried chicken shop after kebab shop after another kebab shop? The only thing that differentiates each of those places are usually the logos and the name of the shop (London Fried Chicken, Tasty Fried Chicken, Hackney Fried Chicken etc. - not a great deal of imagination there). The food is almost ide…

Game theory suggests why this is the case:

https://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2008/03/25/game-theory-tu...

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

#167

Post by babuskov »

alexobenauer wrote: post #38

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…

> 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.

I can only confirm this works. Sort of.

In 2014-2015 I had an idea for a roguelike beat'em up game. Something like adding roguelike mechanics to Castle Crashers. I did google it, but there were no games like that on the market at the time, so I developed everything from scratch.

While developing I never checked Google again. And when I released the first version into Early Access in late 2016, I noticed that there are now two games in the same sub-genre that came out in the meantime. Apparently those were in development long before mine, but the developers didn't bother to tell anyone about it and they just hit the market (i.e. Steam release) one day.

Now, one of the games had a lot of ideas that I came up by myself. One of those was a magic potion called "Crank" based on the movie of same name. You have to keep moving and kill enemies or your health goes down. Exactly the same idea with the same name for the potion. I removed this feature from my game, because this other game was already out and I didn't want to be called a copycat.

But beside those few similar ideas, the rest of the development went completely separate ways. The other two games were mostly linear, mine has procedurally generated mazes to explore. The other two games allow you to carry and use one weapon, mine allows multiple. The other two games have a fixed boss at the end of each level, mine randomly picks one of 24 bosses, etc, etc.

In the end, I have built a successful product that is different enough to cater to slightly different market segment.

Had those two other games been on the market already when I started, I would have probably given up at the very start.

P.S. Sorry if my English isn't top-notch, I'm not a native speaker.

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

#168

Post by tluyben2 »

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.
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