Ask HN: Should we give up and work on something else?

You will always have competition. If not now, then later. Likewise, if you have a good product then you will always have customers. You can not focus just on what other people are doing. If you care and believe in the project, then focus on what you are going to do to make people want to use the product.

Fully concur with levlaz and yitchelle. Do not not give up! Perseverance.

> Shall we give up and start working on something else?

You'll no doubt be told by a lot of folks that you should ignore the competition and execute against your original plans. In principle, this is the correct advice.

But this "We found competition! What should we do?" question seems to be coming up frequently enough that I'm going to give the opposite advice, however harsh it may seem: yes, you may want to consider giving up.

Here's why.

If you never contemplated the possibility that you'd have competition, and that the competition might be better funded and further along than you, which is almost a given in today's market, you did not start your venture with realistic assumptions.

If the existence of competition worries you enough to consider abandoning your venture before you have even launched and after you have asked others to invest money in it, you must honestly ask yourself whether you will have the stomach to keep going when you encounter real challenges, like technical hurdles that threaten your existence or disagreements with your friends/co-founders.

Bottom line: it's virtually impossible to start a successful business with a weak hand. If the opportunity you're pursuing is not compelling enough to keep you from becoming easily discouraged by the slightest challenge before you are even in the market, wait until you find an opportunity that is.

Good luck!

Thanks a lot for this response.

> If you never contemplated the possibility that you'd have competition, and that the competition might be better funded and further along than you, which is almost a given in today's market, you did not start your venture with realistic assumptions.

We always saw a lot of competition in the market (at the end, there are millions of ways people buy clothes) but didn't expect someone to be so spot on with our vision. This was real shocker. As you said, we didn't have realistic assumptions - it started as fun project and we thought we will abandon it like previous one. Only with time we realised this can really be something.

> If the existence of competition worries you enough to consider abandoning your venture before you have even launched and after you have asked others to invest money in it, you must honestly ask yourself whether you will have the stomach to keep going when you encounter real challenges, like technical hurdles that threaten your existence or disagreements with your friends/co-founders.

That's excellent questions. Luckily, after initial shock, I think this motivated us to work even harder. We don't want to give up on idea we really believe in just because someone else was couple months faster. We were postponing launching our app for a long time, and now we decided to just finish most important missing items and put it in Play store.

It also finally motivated me to reach out my network and try to at least have initial meeting with real investors in London. So far we only pitched to friends who probably might have been a bit too supportive.

Hi lndn_dilemna,

I can see why you're having a hard time deciding whether to pursue this or not, it's shocking working for a few months and suddenly a competitor pops up and is going in the same direction as you.

It comes down to determination, if you are determined enough and believe your product is better, then, as hakanderyal said, look at Slack, they took the market by storm.

By the way, nice to meet you -- my name is Ken, I founded Shoppr.

BRING IT ON!