
Ask HN: I have an idea how to become a competitor to Amazon. What should I do? - atrust
I&#x27;m an engineer from AOL. I have an idea how to become a pretty serious competitor to Amazon and other online stores. I have a couple grands in my pocket, which is not enough to hire even 1 engineer.
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brudgers
To be frank, describing Amazon as an "online store" suggests a gross
simplification of their business model. Amazon's business is built on
traditional pillars of retailing: customer service, B2B relations and owning
the best real-estate.

No competitor is going to get better deals with UPS, Fedex and USPS. Partially
because Amazon has located warehouses such that they help negotiate better
shipping contracts and thus provide better customer service.

It has dumped everything that could be a profit into expansion for twenty
years. A newcomer would be hard pressed to sell me a Kindle, a movie download,
a used book and bearings for my clothes dryer all on the same order at an
attractive price and with an aggressive delivery schedule.

If your idea might have legs, some VC will back it.

Good luck.

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atrust
Very good points in your comment. Thank you.

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tlb
You should recruit the rest of a founding team that can get a working version
built without hiring.

Y Combinator funds that sort of thing, and can help a lot with turning an idea
into a growing business. You can still apply late for the Winter cycle, though
if you don't have the complete team yet the Summer cycle might be better.
[http://www.ycombinator.com/apply](http://www.ycombinator.com/apply)

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dmac0415
If you're serious about this idea, you should run it by some of your friends/
co-workers that you respect. If they seem excited by it, continue to develop
the idea with them and bounce ideas off them. Once you gather a group of
people that work well together and have a general understanding of the
problem/solution, start building an MVP. Competing with Amazon, Ebay,
Craigslist, etc is extremely difficult because of positive network effects.
Building a product to compete with the bigs guys is going to require an
enormous amount of effort and a team that seriously believes in the product.
If this is something you're set on gather a small team and get to building and
tweaking. You may find that your competitive advantage doesn't exist, but you
may also find that you can deliver in a way/space that the big guys can't. The
key, however, is to get to building and chasing down users like there's
nothing else that matters. Like others on here have said ideas are a dime a
dozen, so just get to building.

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atrust
Thank you! I appreciate your input. Clever advice.

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taprun
The way to think big is to think small. You can't go head to head against
Amazon all at once. You need to pick a very small area and specialize.

Can you be the best site for selling pewter figurines, plumbing supplies or
bowling equipment? I think you can!

By niching down you can develop a reputation, have a custom-tailored search
and navigation setup, etc. As you start getting more customers and income, you
can broaden your offerings.

For instance pewter figures -> fantasy art -> fantasy books -> board games.

Amazon started with books before it started selling everything else. You could
try the exact same strategy.

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YoAdrian
There's a professor I know that claims he can get you back to 1994, but
beware: he keeps calling everyone Marty and thinks there are people out to get
him.

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atrust
Thank you so much for taking time to write this comment.

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saluki
You are an engineer . . . start building a basic MVP . . . don't worry about
automating behind the scenes stuff . . . do all that stuff manually in the
beginning if it's faster to get up and running. Think launch fast, like in 7
days or 30 days. Get the idea out there fast where people can use it and
validate it.

You are going to need investments to roll out an idea on this scale. But work
up an initial version to prove the concept. The farther you can bootstrap it
the more equity you'll retain.

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tpae
Ideas are dime a dozen, if you are an engineer, you don't need to hire
anybody. Go out there and build a prototype. Find users that will use your
prototype. If it has a positive growth, you can easily find funding for it. If
you are already thinking about hiring another engineer, then I suggest you
read more books on startups.

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atrust
I know that ideas are worthless. I have some thoughts how to start small. The
good thing about the concept is that the business can really grow. The very
best part is that it can very easily grow by the word of mouth. I think I'm
going to build a small business plan and start working on the project itself.

As for the books. I read a lot of them. But, I came with the concept while I
was reading "Zero to One" in a subway train. At one moment I got like a
recovery of sight. BOOM! I closed the book without intending to open it again.

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zeeshanm
While business plans may help you revise your idea, I would recommend against
working on it. Just build your product and get it out there and iterate from
there. You can accomplish so much with so little. But you have to start first.
And nobody did anything great without starting it. :-)

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YesThatTom2
Amazon's prices are subsidized by EC2/AWS services. (For example, bulk
purchasing of internet bandwidth for AWS results in a discount that greatly
benefits Amazon's e-commerce need of bandwidth.)

Therefore, your first step is to spend a few billion dollars building
datacenters, hiring programmers and product people, and create a competitor to
AWS that has approximately equal market share. That should take 5-10 years.

When you are done, you can start your e-commerce system that competes with
Amazon's. You'll have the infrastructure that costs about the same (i.e. is
similarly subsidized) and you'll have a fair fight.

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VincentTide
Server costs have become so minuscule that they can be considered a non-factor
nowadays.

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valarauca1
Network, find people who can work with. Develop the idea more.

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atrust
Amazon just unveiled one-hour delivery. That was my idea. I'm crushed.

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pizza
p2p Amazon?

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atrust
No.

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zygotic12
LSD?

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atrust
I had some thoughts about it. Could be killer! But I want to taste it first ;)

