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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?

#21

Post by woutr_be »

blacksoil wrote: post #19
woutr_be wrote: post #5

Mine is mostly a mental problem, I feel like my product will never be good enough compared to others. Even right now, I'm working on a simple website for a specific niche, but there's already another website that does exactly the same thing. I feel like people will just think I copied there idea, or that they might have better content than me. It's always been an issue for me, and because of it, I've never been able…

If it's "exactly the same thing", I personally wouldn't do it. It doesn't have to be something so significantly different, but it has to be a solution to some real pain points that persist on the existing solution. On his book "From 0 to 1", Peter Thiel goes even more extreme. For him, if something isn't 10x better then the alternative solution, he wouldn't do it. Of course, all the above doesn't apply if your goal o…

Sorry, "exactly the same thing" was bad wording, it's the same concept, but executed differently. You can compare it to two tech blogs who write about the same things. Definitely not an issue, they both give different takes on the same things.

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

#23

Post by alphagrep12345 »

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…

Interesting idea. How's it going so far? Do you have any customers?

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

#25

Post by blacksoil »

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're making a really good insight here. I just wanna give some examples to add to your point. Here in Indonesia there are 2 big Uber clone (at least initially): Gojek and Grab that are both unicorn. In the beginning, they both started off ride-hailing. But after about 4 years, Gojek morphed into a payment company like Chinese We-Pay. It seems they were thinking of ride-hailing as a good customer-acquisition strategy in order to build the initial user base. On the other hand, Grab still seems to be focused on being a transport company, but they expand to a lot more countries. Their main strategy seems to be South East Asia expansion.

I think these are very cool examples on how two seemingly the same thing end up diverging and finding up their own path.

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

#26

Post by SyneRyder »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #9
woutr_be wrote: post #5

Mine is mostly a mental problem, I feel like my product will never be good enough compared to others. Even right now, I'm working on a simple website for a specific niche, but there's already another website that does exactly the same thing. I feel like people will just think I copied there idea, or that they might have better content than me. It's always been an issue for me, and because of it, I've never been able…

> there's already another website that does exactly the same thing I don't think there's anything wrong with this per se, but you still need something to set yours apart. For example, if the features are identical, then the price can be different. If the price is the same, then you can edge them out with features or service or get ready, experience. Amazon won us over with price, but now there are often other places…

> 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 make sure that your competitive advantage is not "selling at a price you can't possibly make a living from".

(Hint: being found first can also be an advantage. Even if you're not better or cheaper than the competition, if they try you first and think "meh, good enough, I can afford that", that can still get you the sale. Not everyone exhaustively researches the competing products.)

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

#27

Post by rdm_blackhole »

I am in the same boat, I started a side project a few months ago and released the MVP without looking too much into the competition. But it turns out there is a lot of it.

The reason I am not going to stop working on it is:

- I am learning a lot while developing the new features(using lots of different tech that I don't necessarily use in my day job)

- it allows me to channel some creativity that I did not know I had

- it doesn't cost me anything to run

- even if it fails I can always use it as a showcase of my skills if I decide to start job hunting.

At the moment my goal is to get 10 users. When I get there, I'll re-evaluate how far I want to take it with this thing.

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

#28

Post by blacksoil »

semireg wrote: post #10

I’ve had this feeling since I used my first Zebra label printer back in ... 2003? It wasn’t until 2012 I was working on the backend programming of Zebra printers that I realized Macs had very little support for designing and printing labels. I created a one off (as in still at version 1.0) native Mac app that used a transparent window and printed whatever was behind it. It is called LabelScope. Fast forward 6 years a…

That's pretty cool! Thanks for sharing. You should post it to indiehackers.com, people would learn so much from your experience :)

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

#29

Post by blacksoil »

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.

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

#30

Post by wolco »

rdm_blackhole wrote: post #27

I am in the same boat, I started a side project a few months ago and released the MVP without looking too much into the competition. But it turns out there is a lot of it. The reason I am not going to stop working on it is: - I am learning a lot while developing the new features(using lots of different tech that I don't necessarily use in my day job) - it allows me to channel some creativity that I did not know I had…

There are advantages because you can see what features work or not before you build them into your product.
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