
Ask HN: Copy & Undercut. Should I do this? - dadads
Call me pessimistic.<p>Every viable web startup idea that I can think of has already been done by other startups who have been there many years before. Many of these startups' products look very polished and usable, that I can't begin to think of how to make a substantially better product that would encourage people to jump ship onto my product.<p>For example, one of my ideas is a repository hosting service. But why the hell would anyone use my service when there's already GitHub/Assembla/BitBucket?<p>I'm thinking of just copying other startups but charge less as a possible strategy.
Is this a good idea?
======
DanielBMarkham
Sounds like you are looking at startups as if your job is to come up with some
new idea.

Don't do this.

Your job is to provide something people want that you can scale. 99.99% of the
time somebody will be able to point at what you are doing and say "That's
already been done!"

People who say this have no idea what they are talking about.

A business is about a hell of a lot more than some unique, creative idea. In
fact, I think it's almost a reliable metric to reverse this thinking: what's
been done to death that other hackers wouldn't like? To me if you want some
kind of system for ideas, that's where I'd go.

But the big-picture ideas are almost always worthless because the devil is in
the details. The "why the hell would anyone use my service" is spot on. The
answer will never be something like "I have a unique idea" -- it'll be a lot
more complicated than that.

I consume a lot of things, and I never make consumption or purchase choices
based on who actually came up with the business concept or how many other
folks are doing it.

~~~
timruffles
I think that's a fantastic way of thinking about it. Businesses don't win
custom by doing totally unique things, but by doing common things in a way
that is local/prettier/cheaper/easier/in a language you speak/on a device you
own.

I think you've changed the way I'll look for "the idea". Not something new,
but a problem I can solve, that people have and that scales, that other people
like me don't want to touch.

One of the best comments I've read on HN, especially for stressing the
complexity of why a product works. Thanks Daniel.

------
patio11
Pretend you have a magic clone wand. Wave your wand at any target. What do you
have?

1). No customers, visitors, or social proof.

2). No marketing strategy.

Sure, you can announce to an uncaring world that your clone is cheaper. So
what? People don't buy Github because it is the cheapest option. They buy it
because it is Github.

To the limited extent that cheap is itself compelling, cheap compels terrible
customers to use you... Until someone undercuts you, at any rate. Pray that
that day is soon, because the pathological customers attracted by Lowest Price
Here are like dementors with keyboards. One glance at a support mail and your
soul will get sucked out of your very eyes.

There are gigantic swathes of the human experience where startups are not as
thick on the ground as "Ooh I should solve the problems of git using
programmers." Go over to the BLS. Look at occupational listing. Sort by
gender. If you see Engineer at top, invert sort. Pick anything now visible on
your screen. Solve their problems. You'll have people laughing _for years_
that there is any money in what you are doing.

P.S. Github's weakness on pricing, to the extent it exists, is that there
exist customers for whom it is too cheap to take seriously.

P.P.S. Feature parity is unnecessary to sell many types of software and is
sometimes _actively harmful_.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
This is going to sound like grumpy old guy, but I really don't mean it that
way.

One of the mistakes I made early on when participating on HN was giving a shit
about what folks here thought about my startup ideas. Funny thing -- I didn't
even realize it. I would just suggest something, somebody would trash it, and
I would move on without working on the idea some more. Unknown to me, I was
letting popular hacker opinion be some kind of gatekeeper to what I wanted to
spend my time on.

To your point, don't do this. If other engineers like the idea -- building
some new toolset or creating the 4000th version of an online scrum tool -- run
away from it. Run far, far away.

I had a cousin who was always trying get-rich-quick ideas. One year it was
zero-down real-estate. Then it was investing. Then it was MLM. Then it was
something else. He read some books, get jazzed up, and work as hard as he
could. But, of course, none of it ever worked out.

One day I was speaking to him on the phone and he was very excited. Yet again.
I kind of sighed inwardly, but then he described to me how he was going to
make a renewable power product -- how the cost per material had a significant
differential, how he had contacts in the import business, how the fabrication
could be done at a small improvement -- all nickel and dime, small percentage,
boring stuff. You know, distribution channels, marketing, production models,
etc.

It was then I knew my cousin was finally going to make it. He graduated from
dealing with all the emotions around startups to actually working the mundane,
small, detailed problems that really make a business hum. There won't be any
books or seminars on how to create a renewable energy manufacturing business
-- he's making up the book as he goes along. That's what real business
building is about. Not about creating some cool new thing or solving world
hunger. Of course, nothing wrong with chasing a dream -- as long as you don't
delude yourself and know what the numbers say. The trick is graduating from
"feel good" startups to actual, real, down-and-dirty, numbers-driven, boring
startups.

~~~
ja27
If people are already writing books about doing it, there aren't many
opportunities left - except in selling books about it.

------
fookyong
compete on anything, anything other than price.

\- design

\- customer service

\- aim for hardcore users

\- aim for entry-level users

\- velocity of improvements

\- tone (is your competition "enterprisey"? be more friendly and mainstream)

etc. this is not an exhaustive list. there's always a way to differentiate.

------
wpietri
> Every viable web startup idea that I can think of has already been done by
> other startups who have been there many years before.

You aren't looking hard enough. At work, about once a week we come up with
another perfectly viable startup idea. We're already working on one, though,
so we file those away just in case.

You're probably looking in the wrong place. You could be mainly looking at
existing companies, which of course means you won't think of anything new. Or
you could be paying attention mainly to the obvious parts of yourself. But
since people like us make startups, the obvious things we need are already
covered.

Instead, go look at other people. Really look. Be an anthropologist at the
ballpark, a psychologist at the coffee shop, a sociologist at the grocery
store, a short-story writer at the bar. Look at the problems people really
have and ask: could I build something that would help?

If you think the answer is yes, go pick up something like "The Entrepreneur's
Guide to Customer Development", or go do a Lean Startup Machine weekend. Learn
how to test your ideas before you write code. When you find an idea you can't
kill without building it (and find it you will) then go build it.

------
wccrawford
Offering different levels of service for different amounts of money is a valid
competition tactic. There are plenty of people who would forego bells and
whistles to pay less for a service.

Of course, that depends on the features and service and price, but that's all
up to you.

It's not unethical at all. It's how capitalism works.

------
ankitshah
Entrepreneurs shouldn't be building things for the sake of making money. If
you're an entrepreneur, it's your job to solve real problems that people have.
It's never about you. It's always about the people you're serving.

~~~
lsc
Sure, that's another way of looking at it. (I mean, obviously, nobody is going
_actually_ believe that a businessman doesn't care about money, but looking at
your idea from the point of view of "what problem am I solving" I think, is a
great thing to do, and many people respond better to the "change the world"
rhetoric than "make lots of money" rhetoric, even though we all know that the
speaker is saying the same thing.)

"If I made something like service X, only cheaper, would that solve a real
problem that people have?"

which is the same question the OP is asking, really, just a different way of
phrasing it.

------
webwright
No. Price is a signal of value-- you'll basically get all of the cheap-bastard
customers for whom a $5/month savings is worthwhile.

Additionally, you'll be hamstrung from a budget point of view in terms of
marketing and product dev budgets.

That said, there are magical price points and economies that technology can
get you. For example, Encarta (the CD-ROM encyclopedia) gutted the door-to-
door encyclopedia business because they could be cheap with a high profit
margin.

So instead of trying to undercut an efficient technology startup, try to
undercut someone (or a whole industry) who isn't using technology effectively.

------
mva
Are there any pain points in these services which you are currently
experiencing? If so, focus on those and that's how to differentiate.

I don't think competing on price will help you a lot: 1\. People use a certain
tool because they like it and they are willing to pay for it. A couple of
dollar less, won't convince them to use your tool. 2\. Too low prices tools
makes people think there is something wrong with it. 3\. You won't survice
when you don't charge enough.

There is always a market for another tool. As long as you solve a problem,
you'll attract users.

------
mdesq
I wouldn't recommend competing primarily on price. Start fresh with solving
the problem in a way you think would address the needs of the market better.
MP3 players existed well before the iPod and cost a lot less.

Find and talk to target customers and try to discern what would meet their
needs best. I've been trying to take Jason Cohen's number of 30 to
heart...find 30 customers who would buy your product, or tweak your offering
until you do. Don't ignore the competition entirely, but don't base what you
do just on what is out there.

------
davidw
Go niche, rather than trying to compete on price. They've been doing it longer
so are likely better at it, and therefore could drop their prices even lower
if they wanted to.

~~~
ed209
I totally agree. Going niche is also much easier if you have less resources.
It makes targeting your potential customers much easier.

Find a niche and find how you can optimise any existing services for that
niche. You can always expand beyond that later on.

------
meric
What about a repository hosting service for non-source code related projects?
Office workers don't use git, yet.

>> I'm thinking of just copying other startups but charge less as a possible
strategy. Is this a good idea?

No. As others mentioned, existing startups will be better than you are at the
same problem because they've been doing it longer. As a result they can always
charge lower than you.

What you can do is take an existing startup idea and aim it at a totally
different class of users. For the example above, instead of recreating git,
what about Google Docs with version history, and aim it at office workers?
They don't use Google docs much because Word is almost better at everyway
except sharing, which they do using email instead of via Google docs. From
friends' anecdotes, it's because email provides crude version history, but
google docs doesn't even provide that.

Just an example.

^^ The above things I said was what I learned in MKTG1001 Marketing Principles
class. Business School makes sense some of the time, I think.

~~~
qohen
In this vein, if you want this kind of functionality, the following might be
worth checking out--a plug-in for WordPress that turns it into a version-
control system for any type of file:

<http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-document-revisions/>

"WP Document Revisions is a document management and version control plugin.
Built for time-sensitive and mission-critical projects, teams can
collaboratively edit files of any format -- text documents, spreadsheets,
images, sheet music... anything -- all the while, seamlessly tracking the
document's progress as it moves through your organization's existing
workflow."

More info (incl. screencast):

[http://ben.balter.com/2011/08/29/wp-document-revisions-
docum...](http://ben.balter.com/2011/08/29/wp-document-revisions-document-
management-version-control-wordpress/)

------
D0rkvsMaximvs
What you CAN do is take someone's idea and focus it very heavily in a single
market or vertical. Provide options that that the original innovator
can't/won't do.

For example, for all of the great web-based services that exist, very few of
them are actually prepared to adequately serve highly regulated/restricted
markets like medical/legal/nat.security/etc.

If you made a Gitub that does a great job of dealing with compliance in any of
those one fields, you just might have a niche. And it might be a niche that
Github didn't want anyway. (this is just an example, for all I know, github
does a great job in these areas).

The best part is that you have an opportunity to innovate....yay YOU!

------
sasha-dv
> _... charge less as a possible strategy. Is this a good idea?_

Usually not. Competing on price is almost always a bad idea. There are two
exceptions to this rule I can think of:

1\. Your "knockoff target" is the only game in town and because of that they
are able to charge a lot.

2\. Their service is expensive to run because their infrastructure costs a lot
(lots of servers, expensive proprietary app stack, ...) while you're able to
run your service on significantly less expensive infrastructure.

The better approach is to see what their existing customers are bitching
about. Where's the bitching there's a problem in need of a solution (and an
opportunity to make money).

------
noahc
Here's how I'd think about it...

1\. If someone is already charging for it and they have customers, they've
already done the hard work. Now you can copy them.

2\. You need to solve a problem better than anyone else. There are lots of
cars, but people buy a partiuclar one because it moves heavy things better, or
impresses the mother in law more, etc.

3\. You should pick a problem that really sucks and charge more for it. I'm
sure there is a specialized case you can solve for related to repo hosting.
Solve that really well and people will gladly pay more for it than github.

------
ig1
Competing on price is a bad idea unless you can substantially change the cost
model.

If you're competing on price you'll have a much smaller margin and you'll get
the worst customers.

When your competitors innovate or increase spending (on talent, marketing,
etc.) you just won't be able to follow because you won't have the margins.

On the other hand if you can shift the costs of business then that can be a
very strong competitive edge, as you can have higher margins at the same price
point as your competitor.

------
badclient
As a counterpoint to the stream of _don't compete on price_ posts, I'd say
leave all options open and look for one where the LTV of your customer is
greater than your cost per cust acquisition.

So if charging a buck instead of ten bucks gets you 100 customers instead of
ten, is may be worth looking into.

------
rexf
That's what I've thought at times, but then I've come to the conclusion that:

Think about the population of big internet sites (google, fb, etc) there will
ever be. There are countless of these sites that have yet to be created as of
today. Therefore, there's plenty of opportunity.

------
antihero
If you can do the same thing for less money, that's just good business. If
you're stealing someone's unique idea, that's still business, just not
particularly moral.

------
jorangreef
Attitude is everything.

Read Henry Ford's autobiography: <http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7213>

------
lsc
Well, obviously _I_ think so. Especially in the infrastructure industry,
starting with very low prices and slowly working your way up the food chain is
essentially how it's done. It's easy in the computer-infrastructure market,
too; you simply don't lower your prices as fast as moore's law lowers your
hardware costs.

I mean, you also need to think about your market and what they care about. It
is a given, I think, that if you are breaking into an established market, you
will be forced to accept lower margin than the established competition. But
some markets? lowering the price won't help you. In those markets, don't lower
your price, but spend a larger percentage of your revenues on sales or
advertising. In some markets, like say contracting to 'enterprise' customers,
it makes sense to actually charge more and give most of that to a middleman;
I've never been able to get as much money directly renting myself out as I
could going through a middleman, even after you take out the middleman's cut.
Large corporations are more concerned about following the procedures than
saving 50%. On the other hand, small companies? they'll switch providers for a
10% discount sometimes. Individuals paying with post-tax money can be even
tighter than small companies. So know your market, and know if spending more
on sales/marketing makes more sense or if firing the salesman and knocking his
commission off the price will sell you more.

Another thing; Even if you provide the same service as the existing player, if
your prices are significantly lower, you will probably be targeting a
different market. I mean, I steal some customers from slicehost, but I think
most of those are older customers who joined up when slicehost was small and
cheaper. These days, really, I doubt there is a lot of overlap between the
sort of people who would consider slicehost and the sort of people who would
consider me.

Really, I think the slicehost example is a good one; back in the day,
Slicehost was seen as the only player (marketing failure, I think, on Linode's
part, mostly, if I'm remembering the timeline right. Linode was UML a long
time ago, which is really a different product, but I think Linode was Xen by
the time Slicehost hit the market. At the time, I was also selling Xen VPSs,
but I was in no way a serious player.) So, there were a lot of people on
Slicehost who switched to Linode or to me as time went on, as they were
individuals or small companies.

But large companies? they want the big name, and barring a buyout, Linode and
I can't give them that. (Linode is earning a reputation on their own, which is
great for them, and really, for me too, because they have no reason to lower
their prices as fast as they would otherwise. But they are a long ways from
having the name that rackspace has.)

I was doing some consulting the other day for a friend who works for a very
large company. They are paying rather a lot for dog-slow OpenVZ VPSs provided
by Verio. They could have gotten a better deal almost anywhere, but they had
the relationship with Verio.

------
diolpah
We chose to enter a business that has been saturated since 1999. Why? Because
it was quite clear that most of the companies in the space were doing it wrong
and inefficiently. We identified _plenty_ of things that we could do better,
and we executed on those things.

It's fairy straightforward to find a niche where the incumbents are operating
sub-optimally.

------
nirvana
To compete on price, the prospect has to have heard about your business, _and_
heard about your competition _and_ realize that your price is better. That's a
lot of conditions. The bigger struggle is getting the prospect to even know
you exist in the first place.

One way to compete on price is to find something you could replicate, take
their price and quadruple it. By charging 4 times as much, you can spend a lot
more on marketing. Sure you'll lose some sales to people who price shop, but
that's a small part of the market. It's possible that with four times the
marketing budget you could bring in more than four times the number of
customers of your competition. I don't know.

This might work best where your primary value add is repackaging a scalable
service that is mostly offered by others.

Maybe you could copy patio11's appointment reminder service, only charge four
times as much. There are a lot of businesses in the USA that take
appointments... with the higher margins, maybe you can afford to send every
one of them a nice packet of information.

The approach I take, though, is to do something original. Even if others have
done it (and others are trying what we're trying, but nobodies really been
successful) I expect we'll do ok because the opportunity is huge and there
aren't that many others doing it.

But even still, I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think that I had a really
compelling competitive advantage. If the others weren't totally screwing up
the opportunity, I'd be a lot less interested.

I think github is NOT screwing up their opportunity, and so that might not be
a business to try and compete with... but there are lots of ideas... just find
something where you can do it better than anyone else, or where you _think_
you have a compelling advantage.... that would be the idea to pursue.

Maybe charing four times as much would give you a compelling advantage in
marketing, I don't know. But that's the kind of price competition I'd go
for.... otherwise, have your own spin and then use that difference to find the
part of (a preferably very large) market to get for yourself.

