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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…
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Interesting idea. How's it going so far? Do you have any customers?
Started this as an open source project with the goal of first creating an ecosystem. So far, I have been getting good reviews from people who are using it as a search solution. Eventually, there will be certain premium features that maybe only 10% of people will really want, and I will charge for that. Playing the long game here.
i like how bill nguyen, founder of the color app, used to say, and i paraphrase, but he never cares about what other people have made, just focus on creating the best experience or something to that effect.
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…
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…
Then you would start a marketing company. Or it will become a fight about who spends the most on marketing, and the only winner would be the marketing companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Started this as an open source project with the goal of first creating an ecosystem. So far, I have been getting good reviews from people who are using it as a search solution. Eventually, there will be certain premium features that maybe only 10% of people will really want, and I will charge for that. Playing the long game here.
How do you protect yourself from Amazon offering it on their cloud? Same issue as MongoDB and Elasticsearch.
I'm not planning to build a billion dollar startup out of Typesense, so I don't face the same problems that Mongo and ES do. I also don't plan to offer a hosted version of Typesense. If somebody else fills that void, I will happy to let them do that. For an infrastructure product, there will always be people who want to run it in-house -- there is enough $$$ to be made in that space.
I voluntarily entered one of the most saturated markets that I'm aware of. It's literally a cliché to "do a photo startup." That rumbling dark cloud of well-funded, well-established competitors on the horizon, and (perhaps my mistaken) belief that I see gaps of sunshine where I can succeed, is one reason I get out of bed every morning and persevere. That, and my wife needs the product. https://blog.photostructure.com…
Both have good reason for building something even though a similar product might exist. Mark Zuckerberg didn't look at MySpace and say "Oh well, there's already a social network where people can connect with each other. I'll stay in Harvard". He saw MySpace and said "I can do better".
For the learning side, it's useful to build something despite its existence for gaining a greater appreciation for how that tool works. There's a service I've used before called Cloud66, which is essentially a wrapper for cloud services like AWS. I liked it so much I decided to build a clone just to see how it all works under the hood, and after replicating it I realised the underlying technologies used to achieve this are pretty simple. There's always good outcomes from building something, whether that be money, learning or just the joy of building something from nothing
I've long been baffled as to why what I'm building doesn't already exist. Sure it's tough to actually design-and-make, but it's basically a holy grail of computing that a ton of people have, I think, generally wanted since long before I was born. The weird thing is that I often do find people working on similar things. Sometimes they're historical projects I'll find a Wikipedia article on, or sometimes they're posted…
> 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…