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

Dear Google, Thanks For Copying My Startup But You’re Doing It All Wrong

willweinraub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 134 posts

Re: Dear Google, Thanks For Copying My Startup But You’re Doing It All Wrong

#91

Post by myko »

Aldo_MX wrote: post #68
shadowmatter wrote: post #40

I'm not going to lie, I didn't like this post as much as I wanted to. The author says that Google is making the same mistakes that LiveNinja made over a year ago. And that LiveNinja has learned a lot and iterated since then. At this point, I'm ready to believe that LiveNinja is the more mature product. That if I have a need, I should probably go to LiveNinja. I'm ready to be sold... But then the author does nothing.…

I have mixed feelings, right now I'm experiencing a similar story with a project I have, and at this point I'm frustrated because whatever feature or differentiator I add, my competition takes it, at this point I feel like I'm the one shaping my competitor. I can only spend ~4 hours/week to this project and I'm the only person behind it, whereas my competitor has ~20 active contributors, so I'm starting to get dismot…

Are they hiring? I feel like I need more backstory on this. Are both projects open source?

Re: Dear Google, Thanks For Copying My Startup But You’re Doing It All Wrong

#92

Post by zaidf »

7Figures2Commas wrote: post #83
shadowmatter wrote: post #40

I'm not going to lie, I didn't like this post as much as I wanted to. The author says that Google is making the same mistakes that LiveNinja made over a year ago. And that LiveNinja has learned a lot and iterated since then. At this point, I'm ready to believe that LiveNinja is the more mature product. That if I have a need, I should probably go to LiveNinja. I'm ready to be sold... But then the author does nothing.…

The target audience for posts like these is more often than not...(wait for it)...the person who wrote the post. When a big company enters your space and becomes a competitor, the first reaction of many if not most founders is to worry. These types of posts are an effort on the part of founders to convince themselves that the larger competitor has an inferior offering and won't be able to compete effectively. Inciden…

Seconded. I used to work at Betterfly which is in the same space and our lack of focus on a vertical ultimately really cost us. To our VC's credit, they always pushed us to pick a vertical--even if it was something completely random. Building a general product for everyone is super hard and you risk satisfying no one. When I moved on from the job to my own start-up, the single biggest lesson I took was to pick a vertical!

Re: Dear Google, Thanks For Copying My Startup But You’re Doing It All Wrong

#94

Post by ye »

highace wrote: post #11

tl;dr: Please buy us. Having Google enter your space must be one of the most crushing things that can happen to a small company. The feeling these guys felt when they saw the announcement must have been mortifying. Even if you have a superior product, like LiveNinja says they have, Google will outmarket you by so many orders of magnitude you just disappear into nothingness.

Also google reimplementing somebody's working business is one of the most evil things I can think of in IT.

Google has pretty much unlimited resources and an army of bored overqualified engineers. They can literally take any successful online business, implement it themselves, and push it forward with their search engine.

It's not illegal, I know, but it is unethical.

Re: Dear Google, Thanks For Copying My Startup But You’re Doing It All Wrong

#95

Post by kamjam »

valvoja wrote: post #48
marveller wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sentiments exactly. I was expecting an explanation why/what exactly LiveNinja is better.

It would have been a great article if they had mentioned 2 or 3 concrete things they have learned. Lets wait for an update...

That article is just a big bitch fest, or maybe it is just his toen I do not like. You could have summed what he says into 2 sentences. As you say, it would have been much more mature to have compared the 2 products, show why their product is better and done away with all the childish ranting.

Re: Dear Google, Thanks For Copying My Startup But You’re Doing It All Wrong

#96

Post by davidjgraph »

shadowmatter wrote: post #40

I'm not going to lie, I didn't like this post as much as I wanted to. The author says that Google is making the same mistakes that LiveNinja made over a year ago. And that LiveNinja has learned a lot and iterated since then. At this point, I'm ready to believe that LiveNinja is the more mature product. That if I have a need, I should probably go to LiveNinja. I'm ready to be sold... But then the author does nothing.…

Entirely seriously, their site has been top of HN for a few hours now. They don't care in the slightest whether the post make more sense, in fact probably better lay the HN counter-argument on a plate with a link-bait headline.

It's a thinly veiled marketing attempt and because we've voted up rather than flagged, it's worked. I'd have a big grin on my face in his position today...

Re: Dear Google, Thanks For Copying My Startup But You’re Doing It All Wrong

#97

Post by joshstrange »

shadowmatter wrote: post #40

I'm not going to lie, I didn't like this post as much as I wanted to. The author says that Google is making the same mistakes that LiveNinja made over a year ago. And that LiveNinja has learned a lot and iterated since then. At this point, I'm ready to believe that LiveNinja is the more mature product. That if I have a need, I should probably go to LiveNinja. I'm ready to be sold... But then the author does nothing.…

Agreed,

I went back and re-read it because at the end I still had the question of "Why is LiveNinja better than Helpouts" or "What is Helpouts doing wrong". I'm not weighing in on either side I just would like to know what he doesn't like about Helpouts.

Re: Dear Google, Thanks For Copying My Startup But You’re Doing It All Wrong

#98

Post by kenkam »

An awful lot of words to say essentially a) Google has a similar product and a hint of you stole our idea but that's ok, OP likes competition and b) OP has learnt much but won't say what it is (at this point I assume it's because of competitive reasons) and c) he's willing to share some of the insights to the market with Google directly so invalidates my assumption in b).

Regardless of how the blog was written -- this is how I got to know LiveNinja. Kudos for that.

Re: Dear Google, Thanks For Copying My Startup But You’re Doing It All Wrong

#99

Post by deathanatos »

oftenwrong wrote: post #34

>I’m pretty underwhelmed. Why? >This is more like a squeeze bunt back to the pitcher and you’re out at first base. How so? >What I’m seeing when I look at Helpouts is some of the exact same mistakes we made over a year ago, while our company was still in private beta. For example? >...you built Helpouts all wrong. Go on... >Will people buy some of these Helpouts? Yes. No doubt. But it’s not going to scale in the way…

Did he ever lay out concrete examples or reasons as to how Google is doing it wrong? I gave up digging through all the fluff.

Re: Dear Google, Thanks For Copying My Startup But You’re Doing It All Wrong

#100

Post by dpark »

vubuntu wrote: post #86
shadowmatter wrote: post #40

I'm not going to lie, I didn't like this post as much as I wanted to. The author says that Google is making the same mistakes that LiveNinja made over a year ago. And that LiveNinja has learned a lot and iterated since then. At this point, I'm ready to believe that LiveNinja is the more mature product. That if I have a need, I should probably go to LiveNinja. I'm ready to be sold... But then the author does nothing.…

Why would he provide fodder to Google Helpouts product managers? He is already 'selling' his product, by writing a blog, by making sure it showed up on HN and pointing out that his product is more mature and Google tried to 'get inspiration' from his product (by creating accounts on his website and probably browsing through features etc). He has drawn enough attention so that potential users might now try it out for…

> Why would he provide fodder to Google Helpouts product managers?

Because the article has no actual content and sounds like self-congratulatory fluff. It doesn't convince me that LiveNinja is better than Google's offering. It convinces me that the author of LiveNinja cannot actually point to one concrete thing that they do better than Google.

Post reply on HN