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

Are there any pain points in these services which you are currently experiencing? If so, focus on those and that's how to differentiate.

I don't think competing on price will help you a lot: 1. People use a certain tool because they like it and they are willing to pay for it. A couple of dollar less, won't convince them to use your tool. 2. Too low prices tools makes people think there is something wrong with it. 3. You won't survice when you don't charge enough.

There is always a market for another tool. As long as you solve a problem, you'll attract users.

Sounds like you are looking at startups as if your job is to come up with some new idea.

Don't do this.

Your job is to provide something people want that you can scale. 99.99% of the time somebody will be able to point at what you are doing and say "That's already been done!"

People who say this have no idea what they are talking about.

A business is about a hell of a lot more than some unique, creative idea. In fact, I think it's almost a reliable metric to reverse this thinking: what's been done to death that other hackers wouldn't like? To me if you want some kind of system for ideas, that's where I'd go.

But the big-picture ideas are almost always worthless because the devil is in the details. The "why the hell would anyone use my service" is spot on. The answer will never be something like "I have a unique idea" -- it'll be a lot more complicated than that.

I consume a lot of things, and I never make consumption or purchase choices based on who actually came up with the business concept or how many other folks are doing it.

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 take an existing startup idea and aim it at a totally different class of users. For the example above, instead of recreating git, what about Google Docs with version history, and aim it at office workers? They don't use Google docs much because Word is almost better at everyway except sharing, which they do using email instead of via Google docs. From friends' anecdotes, it's because email provides crude version history, but google docs doesn't even provide that.

Just an example.

^^ The above things I said was what I learned in MKTG1001 Marketing Principles class. Business School makes sense some of the time, I think.

Entrepreneurs shouldn't be building things for the sake of making money. If you're an entrepreneur, it's your job to solve real problems that people have. It's never about you. It's always about the people you're serving.