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Ask HN: Copy & Undercut. Should I do this?

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Re: Ask HN: Copy & Undercut. Should I do this?

#31

Post by ja27 »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #28
patio11 wrote: post #25

Pretend you have a magic clone wand. Wave your wand at any target. What do you have? 1). No customers, visitors, or social proof. 2). No marketing strategy. Sure, you can announce to an uncaring world that your clone is cheaper. So what? People don't buy Github because it is the cheapest option. They buy it because it is Github. To the limited extent that cheap is itself compelling, cheap compels terrible customers t…

This is going to sound like grumpy old guy, but I really don't mean it that way. One of the mistakes I made early on when participating on HN was giving a shit about what folks here thought about my startup ideas. Funny thing -- I didn't even realize it. I would just suggest something, somebody would trash it, and I would move on without working on the idea some more. Unknown to me, I was letting popular hacker opini…

If people are already writing books about doing it, there aren't many opportunities left - except in selling books about it.

Re: Ask HN: Copy & Undercut. Should I do this?

#32

Post by ja27 »

davidw wrote: post #7

Go niche, rather than trying to compete on price. They've been doing it longer so are likely better at it, and therefore could drop their prices even lower if they wanted to.

Ed Dale's [30 Day] Challenge just started a few days ago. This is a free online marketing course aimed at beginners but it has some decent material for everyone. The goal is to identify a profitable niche in 30 days - big enough to have traffic, small enough that you can own the niche.

http://www.challenge.co/

Re: Ask HN: Copy & Undercut. Should I do this?

#33

Post by D0rkvsMaximvs »

What you CAN do is take someone's idea and focus it very heavily in a single market or vertical. Provide options that that the original innovator can't/won't do.

For example, for all of the great web-based services that exist, very few of them are actually prepared to adequately serve highly regulated/restricted markets like medical/legal/nat.security/etc.

If you made a Gitub that does a great job of dealing with compliance in any of those one fields, you just might have a niche. And it might be a niche that Github didn't want anyway. (this is just an example, for all I know, github does a great job in these areas).

The best part is that you have an opportunity to innovate....yay YOU!

Re: Ask HN: Copy & Undercut. Should I do this?

#34

Post by qohen »

meric wrote: post #8

What about a repository hosting service for non-source code related projects? Office workers don't use git, yet. >> I'm thinking of just copying other startups but charge less as a possible strategy. Is this a good idea? No. As others mentioned, existing startups will be better than you are at the same problem because they've been doing it longer. As a result they can always charge lower than you. What you can do is…

In this vein, if you want this kind of functionality, the following might be worth checking out--a plug-in for WordPress that turns it into a version-control system for any type of file:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-document-revisions/

"WP Document Revisions is a document management and version control plugin. Built for time-sensitive and mission-critical projects, teams can collaboratively edit files of any format -- text documents, spreadsheets, images, sheet music... anything -- all the while, seamlessly tracking the document's progress as it moves through your organization's existing workflow."

More info (incl. screencast):

http://ben.balter.com/2011/08/29/wp-document-revisions-docum...

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