Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 301 posts

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

#151

Post by ehnto »

blacksoil wrote: post #29
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.

You could use Lucene directly in a couple of languages:

Python Port: https://lucene.apache.org/pylucene/index.html

.NET Port: https://lucenenet.apache.org/

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

#152

Post by _Understated_ »

Any time I am talking to younger entrepreneurs about ideas they have that already exist in some fashion I give them a simple analogy to ponder over: Rice!

I tell them to take a look at the rice isle in the supermarket and ask themselves "why are there so many varieties of rice?"... it's rice for goodness sake! How can one be different to another?

How can there possibly be a need for hundreds of different types of rice.

Even if you just pick one type, like white rice, there are multiple brands competing with something as simple as rice.

Every item on a supermarket shelf has earned the right to be there because people are buying it for different reasons.

Everyone is different: Some people only buy Uncle Ben's rice at 4 times the price of the supermarket rice and others only touch the unbranded value rice.

It's all marketing.

So if your idea already exists then it means there is probably a demand and you just need to find your angle and market it appropriately.

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

#153

Post by pkghost »

sheetjs wrote: post #53
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…

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…

> $1M per year, is too small to draw anyone's attention.

I'll take this opportunity to tell a long-winded story about how that number can be two orders of magnitude larger, and still be too small.

I was with Slide when Google bought us in 2010. They bungled the acquisition (bought us to work on Google+, which had already made a bunch of disagreeable decisions by the time we were ready to rumble), so we were left to our own devices for a year, in which time about 12 of us made something called Photovine, a photo sharing app that would have competed with Instagram, and we were getting pretty universally positive press. I think TechCrunch called it the best mobile app google had ever produced, and all of our beta and early release engagement numbers were bananas.

(We also had loads of fun with it — the core sharing mechanic was organized around shared captions that we called vines, and we spent most of our play-testing time swapping visual puns.)

Anyway, if you project our trajectory generously, which didn't seem out of the question given our early traction, we would have wound up competing with Insta, doing business in the hundreds of millions. But Larry, in all his "more wood behind fewer arrows" wisdom, decided to axe the project, as he did many, many others, and re-assign all of us to YouTube, which, granted, was gearing up to compete with TV, and needed more staff.

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

#154

Post by markdown »

mceachen wrote: post #68

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…

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, so I have to point out that clicking your logo while in the blog takes you to the blog index, rather than the site home page. This is wrong.

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

#157

Post by mrich »

The longer you are in the industry, the more you realize that things repeat and the only thing that matters is getting some market share and growing your business. This can happen in a number of ways - perhaps a beautiful UI, network effects, lower costs, or a new technology platform (web) that shakes up existing markets. So it happens all the time, you just need to find the right angle to best the incumbents.

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

#158

Post by VvR-Ox »

Not necessarily.

Overall: Look at all these products that have nearly identical features (with only some distinction).

The key is to think about the features that would make your product unique and to analyze whether there is people who will prefer your product (at your price point) to all the other options.

I'd love to bring something innovative to the market but it really isn't necessary. A lot of people focus on things that a lot of other people don't care about or like. So it's easy to get a decent market share with basically already existing products that just provide some "buy-worthy" features.

Of course competition can be harder here but on the other hand you don't have to put that much effort into building something completely new (which will give others the opportunity to improve upon your great idea).

It's also easier to analyze an already existing market.

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

#159

Post by AstralStorm »

guiriduro wrote: post #132
dusted wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't IBM do a programming language like that once? They found out, that most times, people don't actually know what they want, or how to explain it in a way that only have one or two perfectly valid interpretations.

SQL? That's an interesting case. It sits at the nexus of a well-defined relational theory, Codd et al., and normalised table data, and you can only ask it things which make sense like selection, projection and various joins. To the question of intentionality, it is declarative and does hide a lot of the work of arriving at the requested result. Perhaps when viewed in the context of a more tightly defined problem set…

Having a grab bag of algorithms did not make an idea. I suspect the author thought more of responding to user's intentions not software doing whatever it wills.

This being a multitude of hard AI unsolved problems layered one on another. Such as building a fitness function or goal based on natural language input combined with context and refinement.

I know if two semi successful very limited attempts, one being Google DeepMind AutoML, the other being Bayou. They're really not too useful in practice anymore. (State of the art surpassed anything they are capable of.)

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

#160

Post by AstralStorm »

SyneRyder wrote: post #135
AstralStorm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't beat "free" on price which is why Google is so terrible to compete against.

Sometimes you can beat free! You can outlive the free / freeware competitors, because they're often not making money! Remember Google often kills off their services. They bought Picasa & the Nik Photography Collection & made them both available for free... now Picasa is gone (even though there's a ton of customers who still want it), and Google sold the Nik Collection to DxO and it's back to costing $70 again. And Fa…

I said on price. Beating service on stability and support is not competing on price - that is very much possible. You can compete with Google on both of you aim at their enterprise package or cloud offering.
Post reply on HN