

Do you live under the fear that a YC company is about to demo what you working on? - rokhayakebe


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parker
There was a great article on news.YC the other day about some of intuit's
reasons for success. This quote stuck in my mind:

"Your competition isn't other companies, but the way things are done now"

There were like dozens of other companies working on personal finance
software, and the intuit founder instead concentrated on his biggest foe: pen
and paper. And hey, if it's a big enough market, it can support many different
companies!

~~~
marrone
yeah, let's face it. You ALWAYS have to assume there is someone else out there
doing the same thing you are doing. That shouldn't sway you though. The point
is to do it better than them. Reading pg's book has great (and funny)
commentary on dealing with the competition...

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ivankirigin
No, don't worry about someone else making something. Worry about how fast you
can make it yourself. Worry about your community of users. But try to keep
track of your competition.

~~~
iamyoohoo
Amen to that!

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lmcateer
I have put a lot of thought into this. I was going to apply to the next YC
class, and have had much encouragement to do so from my friends at google,
however, I just got accepted to law school, and plan on continuing my project
from there, maximizing the free legal advice I get from peers / professors.

Basically, from what I have read / researched / been told by people who-know-
what-they-are-talking-about, competition in this field is actually a good
sign:

1\. It means that someone else has decided your product/service is worthwhile
enough to actually spend the time and energy to develop it. 'No competition'
is very often a good indicator of 'Bad idea' or 'No market.'

2\. The market -- the internet market, anyway -- is vast. Facebook has 15M
users, myspace 35M, linkedin 12.5, bebo 12.5... (plus or minus, who can even
keep track anymore?). There is plenty of room for companies with competing
services, especially if their products are marked by substantially different
features and/or payment methods (or lack thereof).

3\. Motivation: if I found out tomorrow that a YC company was doing exactly
what I was doing, I would probably sleep less and try to get my product to
market faster. Currently, there are a few competitors, but their services are
either targed outside my demo or are, well, crappy. It is precisely the lack
of the service that I am trying to provide that is my main motivation for
working to bring it to market: I want to use it! Competition would validate
that other people are thinking like me, and would also go a long way -- by
using their product -- of understanding exactly what it is I am getting myself
into.

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tocomment
I wish someone would steal my idea because then I could partner with them.
It's so hard to find cofounders these days as we all know.

~~~
parker
Let me suggest a new strategy -- copy someone else's idea, make it seem like
you're totally legit, and THEN partner with them :). Maybe you could start a
new search engine and just partner with Google:

"Yo, Larry & Serg, we SO need to work together!"

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david
If you don't, try to convince yourself that you should. I've found paranoia to
be a very effective way of beating procrastination.

~~~
rokhayakebe
I agree.

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dood
I would wager that the chances of two separate startups producing
detrimentally similar websites is negligible, unless you are working on a
totally unoriginal me-too type site (and even then...).

[where 'detrimentally similar' is defined as 'so similar that the market can
only support one of the two, assuming people actually want it']

~~~
pg
It used to be fairly uncommon, but if the number of people starting startups
increases 10x or 100x as I've theorized it will, overlaps will start to be
more of a problem.

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henning
If you have no competition, there might not be a market for what you want to
create, so competition can actually help you out.

It's also possible to address similar sets of needs in different ways. digg
and reddit are both successful. Live and let live. Namaste.

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michelson01
'YC company' is the new google

~~~
rokhayakebe
This thing is going to be a Power Plant.

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sabat
Sure I do. And I really worry if I find out that someone has done stuff well
and completely when I've barely started.

But other than that, competition often just validates a market. God knows
Google didn't care that Infoseek, Excite, and Altavista already existed.
Obviously they were doing it wrong.

~~~
pg
I think Google probably cared about Altavista.

~~~
sabat
I guess we have to define "care". I'm saying that Google didn't care enough
about Altavista's technology to let it stop them from trying to out-do it.

