
How HackerNews ruined my morning - swanson
http://swanson.github.com/blog/2011/02/22/how-hackernews-ruined-my-morning.html
======
edw519
Here's an idea: find _someone else_ with a problem and work on that. This
works especially well if the someone else is in business, very busy, and has
some money. Chances are better that your solution to their problem won't have
much competition: if it did, they would have already gone with it.

I know this is the opposite of "scratch your own itch", but I always found
that advice overrated. I have always been much more successful scratching
other people's itches.

~~~
tptacek
1000x this. The Internet doesn't mean every idea you have will be built by 10
other people first; it means that every idea you have that serves 20-something
geeks will be built by 10 other people first. Build for other people. Added
bonus: other people tend to actually spend money for solutions to their
problems.

~~~
patio11
Can I recommend building for ladies? It's like you get to avoid 98% of the
competition _for free_.

~~~
steveklabnik
The issue is that it's hard to know what ladies want, but then again, that's
your competitive advantage...

I mean this in the "It's harder to come across this information" sense, not
the "LOL ladies, amirite?" sense.

~~~
tptacek
It's not at all hard to know what ladies want. Start by talking to ladies. The
Internet improves your nerdy guy private life in a variety of ways. Distill
them to crisp examples. Seek isomorphisms in your conversations with women.
You buy hobby item X, they may buy hobby item Y. Or, maybe they buy X too, but
are too put off by the culture of the sites/apps that help you with X. You
have job N. They have job K. You rarely think about K because you're an N and
a guy. And so on.

Teaching. Fabric and crafts. Child care (holy is there ever a billion dollars
waiting for whoever cracks the code on babysitters). PR work.
Marketing/communications. Office managers. Metalworking. Literary fiction. I'm
sure you can find something.

~~~
chc
I don't want to be a negative nancy, but every idea I can think of along those
lines with an obvious profit angle actually _has_ been built by 10 people
first. For example, babysitters — there are tons of sites in that space. Just
Google "find a babysitter" and you'll get a full page of sites dedicated to
just that.

~~~
tptacek
Not one of them work. We spend thousands on this problem every year.

------
il
I've created successful products (pretty close to commodity products, in fact)
before where I tried to evaluate direct competitors, and found over 50 of them
before stopping counting.

Here's what emboldens me when learning about competitors: When you initially
had this idea, you weren't aware that all of these competitors existed. Which
means that some segment of the market, including potential customers who are *
similar to you* also don't know about all of the competitors. To them, the
other people with the same idea might as well not exist.

~~~
swanson
That is a great point, thanks for the advice!

------
dools
_"A few hours (and a pity party) later, I realized that this isn’t the end of
the world. The concept has been validated"_

This is an important realisation. Just because there is someone else already
doing something isn't a reason _not_ to do it. It seems like this affliction
is curious to software, and possibly more pronounced in web based software.

In his post entitled "Making Ideas Work"[1], Chris Savage (CEO of Wistia)
relates his experiences prior to starting Wistia:

 _"There are tons of viable startup ideas that get stopped before they get a
chance to start. These ideas get left un-executed for a multitude of reasons
including fear, money, and time. But, the most common roadblock I see is
overestimation of the competition. The process goes like this: come up with an
idea, google to see if it’s been done, find someone doing something similar,
and give up.

As it turns out, this is the exact process we went through when trying to
start Wistia. We’d think we were onto something exciting because our idea was
so unique, then we’d find a company doing something similar and we’d give up
on that particular approach. We continued this vicious cycle for 4 months
until we realized that absolutely no one else had heard of the ‘competition’
we’d found. It turns out that it’s actually really, really hard to get people
to pay attention or use anything. After this epiphany it was easy to forge
ahead."_

Now I'm not saying your book side-project is, like, your _startup_ idea or
anything but obviously you've fallen victim to a very, very common thing in
our industry and that's to drastically over-estimate the value in being a
first mover.

If something already exists, don't be afraid to compete! The "market" out
there is unimaginably huge and people just wander round trying out all sorts
of things. Not only that but it's constantly growing, not only due to
population growth but the growth of the internet itself. There's room for
everyone to get in there and have a slice of the pie.

[1]<http://savagethoughts.com/post/1591677111>

~~~
bootload
_"... the most common roadblock I see is overestimation of the competition
..."_

Such a profound observation of why competition is important. There is a
problem with competing in exactly the same space though. The pie slice I'm not
so sure about. There is a strong correlation between Internet sites, and users
which gives you an upper-bound on returns: _Adermic, Huberman_ , _"Zipf’s law
and the Internet"_ ~ <http://www.scribd.com/doc/3254689/Zipfs-law-and-the-
Internet>

------
thingsilearned
A year and a half ago I was working on a python realtime push server I'd
serendipitously code named Cyclone. It was an alternative to having to use
twisted or Orbited and I was super excited about it.

Then one morning I woke up to this [http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/10/facebook-
open-sources-frien...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/10/facebook-open-sources-
friendfeeds-real-time-tech/)

I got drunk that night and whined a whole bunch feeling that my work was
wasted, but the next day I dug into their code and was really excited. It was
a much better implementation saving me a ton of time and I've been happy using
it ever since.

------
JSig
When I spent more time writing songs, I would go through a similar emotional
and mental strain but in smaller iterations. There would be periods in which
no matter what chord progression or melody I came up with, it always seemed to
sound like a song that someone else had already written. When this happened I
would discard the song in frustration, even if it had great potential.

In time I figured out that some of my favorite songs had the same chord
progressions, structure and melody as each other but they still did not sound
the same. Why not?

Every artist has a vision and a song written by someone else should have no
impact on that vision. My problem was that I was too worried on being original
instead of being focused on having a vision.

Just as music has been passed from generation to generation so are ideas. Many
ideas seem to owe to some other idea. Don't worry about being the first. Worry
about being the best.

------
sp_
I used to think like him in the past. But these days I am already so occupied
with executing on things at my job and in my free time that I thank the high
heavens every time I realize someone else has executed on "my" idea.

Every time this happens, someone else solved a problem for me for a fraction
of the cost that would it take me to implement. I can just pick another thing
from my ideas.txt file and work on that.

This happened quite a lot recently because I want to break into Android
development with a friend of mine. The first three ideas we came up with have
already been done. It turned out that one of the ideas is an amazingly popular
apps in the Android store already. Too bad it was not us who did it. But then,
now we have finally found an Android app idea nobody has executed on yet and
we will start working on it today.

------
thibaut_barrere
Hey Matt! I'm the guy behind HackerBooks - I certainly can relate, because I
felt the same way more than once (for hackerbooks, earlier on for learnivore,
and for other sites as well).

But here's the trick: there's really room for more than one app on each topic.

Take the "time tracking" topic for instance: search how many profitable
business work around that topic. You'll be amazed!

I can only encourage you to release your app, which I will definitely use!

~~~
swanson
Hi Thibaut, thanks for the kind words and the email. Hopefully some friendly
competition can help us both improve :)

------
dpcan
Has the idea been "validated" just because it made the first page of Hacker
News?

Anyway, I write apps for Android, and I actually entered a really crowded
space because I thought I could do better, and now I have the #1 app in my
genre.

It's a big world. There are lots of people. And I don't see any reason why
there can't be room for 2 similar products, as long as they are both great.

~~~
swanson
I considered it validated because HN is the ideal target market and there was
a lot of interest in the comments, not just because it was on the front page.

------
bootload
_"... The sting is even worse when you have invested time and resources
already. The idea may be “worthless”, but it sure doesn’t seem that way when
its YOUR idea. ..."_

And you give up so easy?

First understand why determination is important ~
<http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html> There are also multiple
suggestions on how to generate ideas worth working on found in these articles:

\- <http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html>

\- <http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html>

------
seles
Another obvious lesson to take from this is that it is sometimes better to
release something imperfect and improve upon it, rather than wait for the
perfect product, because by then you may be irrelevant.

The downside to this is lack of agility due to trying to maintain backwards
compatibility, and being bogged down by support.

~~~
zeemonkee
That's very true. A project I'm working on at the moment has some of the worst
code I've seen. Copy and paste crap everywhere. No understanding of good
programming practices or web design. A mountain of technical debt.

Yet, the company is doing well, making money, hiring people and expanding
quickly.

Had they waited until their skills were good enough, or spent a fortune on
experienced developers, they would not be where they are today - with a heap
of technical issues sure, but also with the money to throw at these issues.

------
DanielBMarkham
At the risk of sounding presumptuous, since I have another one of the sites
you mention, I think I need to say a couple of things.

It's a mistake to view all these book sites as somehow enemies of each other.
The simple fact is, at 7% commission and an audience of 100K or so, you aren't
going to be buying yachts off the Mediterranean coast any time soon. hn-books
was a hobby site for me. I used it to test out a few different ideas I had
about how to deploy internet apps. The only reason you keep seeing posts from
hn-books is because I had a bet with JacquesM about how viable the site would
be. I thought it was nothing more than a lark, while Jacques thought it had a
lot of potential. So I thought doing a dozen book reviews or so would at least
show traction or not. So far I'm winning the bet.

The second thing is that execution beats everything else. I spent 2 weeks on
hn-books and I was done with it. No more coding, no more anything. I don't sit
around and obsess over it, I don't plan all kinds of new features, and I don't
worry about how it's traffic compares to others. The only thing I worry about
hn-books is that it gets enough votes when I post a review to come off the
"no-follow" list. And that's simply because the bet with Jacques wouldn't be
fair if it didn't. A lot of you guys have spent ten times as much time as I
spent on hn-books and still don't have anything to show for it. Maybe a little
less thinking and a little more execution? We have a couple dozen guys with
site ideas and only a few deployed? Surely we can do better than that.

So if you want to do books, have fun with it! Try some new stuff out. Do
something you've never done before. But whatever you do, don't sit around
planning or dreaming up how it might be great or horrible or how your
competitors might do this or that. All of that is just a waste of time.
Execute. Then decide if you want to keep working on your site or move on to
something else.

Yes, you can do some Chinese Math and convince yourself that there is a
fortune in tech books and somehow we're all in some cutthroat competition. But
do yourself a favor: don't do that. You can execute perfectly and still fail
completely. So worrying won't get you anywhere. In the end, a site like you
want has to be for yourself first, the community second. If you start thinking
outside of that, you're probably wasting energy.

Also, I would be careful about taking every comment over in that thread as
some kind of to-do list. There's a difference between asking a bunch of folks
to comment randomly on some neat site and figuring out exactly what you need
to do to accomplish some goal. Sometimes you just have to say no.

BTW, I posted a link to hackerbooks on my blog. I'm happy to post a link to
your site as well when it comes up. Just let me know. I refuse to make this
competitive. This should be something that helps everybody out. I'm hoping to
learn some stuff from you guys! I'm excited about all the ideas out there.

Recently I've thought that after I do the first dozen or so books, I might
continue on for a while. But not because of any great business plan: I just
like reading great books and reviewing great tools and talking about how cool
they are. I know some people think that's pumping the tools or books, but I
like 'em, they've helped me, and I'm going to explain why I like 'em. Screw
everybody else. I think you have to work from inside out on this stuff. (Quite
frankly, my advice to you is if you want to execute on something to make a few
dollars, find something besides books. For some reason, everybody and their
brother are into books nowadays. Edw is right: if you want to make money, find
somebody with money who is in pain and help them, don't concentrate on
scratching your own itch so much.)

Let us know how it goes!

~~~
swanson
Hi Daniel, I did not intend to make into a 'battle'. The site is just a hobby
for me as well, I have no delusions about getting bought out by Amazon or
spinning this into a huge thing. My goal, in fact, was to make enough money
each month that I could buy a new book :)

The enemies reference fit in nicely with Getting Real -- which I recently
finished reading and was what pushed me to build the site -- but I hope that
it didn't come off as being overly aggressive/hostile.

Thank you for the advice, I will take it to heart.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
tptacek hit the nail on the head: find something somewhere else.

hn-books is extremely powerful: as a laboratory to tell me how to do other
sites. As a book site it isn't hitting on so much (as much as I am growing to
like it) If you were to find another market where there aren't 40 thousand
guys writing code? Something like that might have a LOT more traction. (wink,
wink, nudge, nudge)

------
pinguar
This is exactly how I feel over the past couple of years, and each time I
convinced myself that it's better to have competitors.. because it makes
sense, right? (potential users, their needs, etc.)

But somehow this feeling that other people also came up with that cool idea
("my idea", "the idea") took all my passion about the project away.

My biggest disappointment was when I see flavours.me while I was coding
exactly the same. I was thinking to make the website involved with information
retrieval/recommendation though, but the interface was going to be exactly the
same. At that time, I even started a master's program with an emphasis on
machine learning in order to code this project better and my thesis advisor
was an author of one of the machine learning books that's being recommended at
hackerbooks.com and probably one of the best academic I can study on machine
learning). Everything was going perfect --until a friend of mine told me about
flavours.me... and all my passion just went away because I was exactly looking
at the project that I was gonna implement -even the backend was going to be
much more different.

But then, when about.me got acquired by AOL, I disappointed much more because
they did the same project with flavours.me and they got successful.. Now, I
can realize that it's not about the unique idea. It's about to fill tiny gaps,
and keep trying until you bet your competitors. And a couple of months ago, I
started my project again and I think it's gonna be awesome.

But still, I think it discourages to see an implemented copy of your idea
before getting started to work on it. Maybe it's better to come up with a
quick (but not that dirty) implementation of the project, and then looking for
competitors (and hopefully, to see you are doing better) and then improving
your idea.

------
joshu
I love it when I have an idea and find out that someone else already did it -
it lets me cross it off my list! I produce FAR more ideas than I can execute,
and it makes me feel bad to let them fester. I would love to find people who
need help with the ideas and can do much of the execution (and in fact I work
this way with some people, to good effect.)

------
soulclap
It's almost a naive thing to say and I probably wouldn't ever do it myself
either (and perfectly understand everyone's reasons not to) but somehow it's
awkward that no one said "come on guys, join forces".

No criticism towards the respective project owners either, don't get me wrong.
And like other comments pointed out, there's definitely room for more than one
solution.

------
joelhaasnoot
Go work in industry: you'll find plenty of products or pieces of
infrastructure that have been developed solely because a) there was no money
for the best solution, b) best solution was open source and we can't use it
(think finance, insurance, etc.) or c) someone thought they could do a better
job. But I agree, it's very discouraging to work on something that isn't the
first or you know there are very many of. First year in college, the first
full-time group project we had was done by all the 200 other CS students at
the college, in groups of 5. That's 20-30 groups all developing the same
software according to the same 40 page requirements package. Oh, and they used
the same project for 3-4 years. That's 120 solutions to the same essential
problem and is very demotivating, even for students.

------
coenhyde
Glad you realised it's not the end of the world. Just remember there are 6
billion people in this world. Probably 1 billion have internet access. The
likely hood someone else has the same idea as you is very high. You discovered
half a dozen people with the same idea. But if half a dozen people have a
product to show there where probably hundreds who initially thought that such
a service would be a good idea. The only thing separating those hundreds with
the half a dozen is action.

So instead of competing with hundreds on the idea alone you are competing with
half a dozen on implementation. I'm not sure about you but I like those odds.

------
jonstjohn
I was listening to a 'To The Best of Our Knowledge' interview last week with
Chuck Close, the American painter, and he said something interesting and
relevant. He said that we are all very good at problem solving, but not good
at problem creating. Problem creating is the process of finding interesting
challenges. He found it in his art, and suggested that if we can find our own
interesting, unique challenges, we don't need to find ways to keep up with
everybody else, or worry about others taking our ideas. Kind of interesting
and unique perspective.

------
jonpaul
I don't like the statement that "Hacker News ruined my morning." That seems
like you're either creating a link-bait headline trying to appeal to the
emotions of HNers or you're trying to shift responsibility from yourself to
another entity.

I really don't think that you're trying to do either; it seems to me you just
wanted to vent and share your thoughts. Though, you may want to consider how
your headline may read to your intended audience. I typically don't respond
well to these types.

Use the fact that competition exists as validation for a market. I wish you
the best of success.

------
gohat
Whenever I start a project in the internet/web app field, the first thing is
to come up with a great idea and get excited about it.

Then do nothing.

The next step? Check thoroughly to see if it was done already.

------
codeslush
This could have been me writing this article! In fact, it's ironic because
just this morning I wrote post on HN asking if I should release early or add
some more polish for this very reason. No, my site isn't related to books!
Yes, variations of the problem I'm trying to solve get announced here more
often than I would like to see! :-) I guess your post was better written,
cause mine only got a few points! Maybe your title worked!!!

------
esmevane
Competition proves the market. Why are you disappointed to learn that other
people might have the same idea? It means it's worth pursuing if more than one
person is doing it, right? Just add your own flavor, and have integrity and
faith in the individual value of your product.

On the other hand, if your faith in your product hinges on how avant-garde the
concept is, I don't think you're going to routinely be satisfied with your
creations.

------
naner
_The sting is even worse when you have invested time and resources already._

This is why they say release early and release often. Try not to fret too
much. At least you didn't spend tons of resources on an iOS app to have Apple
change the terms of service in a manner that you can't comply with. Sucks to
be those guys.

------
jhrobert
Perseverance. I you hold to your vision long enough you may have some nice
surprises along the way, like competitors giving up or pivoting.

It happened to me recently when wetpaint decided to pivot out of the market
for simple wikis (under the "pressure" of impatient VCs maybe...).

------
aspir
If anything, having competitors validates that you have good ideas; there is
also a clear, widespread pain if some one else is tying to solve the problem.

If your implementation is indeed better, and you can hustle, its likely that
you'll do well.

------
zelandpanther
It's bad when you find out that idea that you working on is already develop by
someone else. But if that happens you have two options: try with some other
idea or try to make 'stolen' idea better : )

------
lelele
This guy just doesn't cut it to be an entrepreneur.

Other start-ups developing a product similar to yours will help you boost your
business, not sink it. PG made it by doing something other people were making
too. He thinks the programming language his company were using gave them an
edge. I don't think so. I think it wasn't about the programming language
itself: it was about smart people who were able and dared to really think
different, knowing that "different" was "better".

Your business is just your people and you, not your product. Think about
building a great team, not a great product.

------
tehmasp
Dude - 'C'est la Vie'.

------
tastybites
How a typical person thinks: "Lots of people are already doing that. I give
up. They've taken all the money there is and ever will be for this
product/service!"

How a typical business person thinks: "If I can take 1% of each of my 5
competitors' market share, I can make $x millions. Better head over to EDGAR
and read some 10-K reports."

How uber-startups like Google and Facebook think: "If I can take the majority
of all of my competitors market share through superior marketing and
technology, and increase the size of the market at the same time, then we're
worth $XX billions."

Notice how you don't have to invent anything completely new, just innovate on
existing stuff that's proven to make money.

~~~
ScottBurson
If that's what the typical business person thinks, they're wrong. It's not
about taking fractional shares of existing markets; it's about finding
defensible niches. Fractional market shares have a way of going to zero if
your product is just a me-too.

~~~
tastybites
I think you're wrong. Take a look at the toilet paper selection at the
supermarket next time you're there. Every single brand you see has a
fractional market share, and very few of them are going to zero any time soon.
There's millions of dollars to be made in wiping asses.

According to your theory of market dominance, there should be only one type of
TP available after all the 'fractional' players go to zero. Or at the very
least, several 'defensible' niches - how exactly would that apply to the
squares of paper you wipe your shit with? To me they look the same. They're
rolls of paper on cardboard tubes that differ in price and softness.

Business goes way beyond websites.

~~~
ScottBurson
You answered your own question: they differ in price and softness. There's a
"basic TP" niche and a "premium TP" niche -- and maybe a couple more, but not
many.

Okay, you say, since no two products are exactly identical, how is my talk of
niches not vacuous? Because it's not enough for the products not to be
identical: they must be differentiated in the mind of the market. That is, the
differences must _matter_ to at least some part of the market. If you have a
small market share, and you are unable to differentiate your product from its
competition in some way -- price or features or both -- your market share
_will_ go to zero. The world is littered with examples; I'm sure you can think
of plenty yourself.

Ask any angel or VC you know what they think of a business plan that proposes
to capture a small fraction of a huge market, without laying out a viable
marketing plan for differentiating the product.

~~~
tastybites
I'm not talking about ideas that angels or VCs like, I'm talking about running
a real god damn business. Your mind has been twisted into thinking like a VC.
You're talking about the toilet paper market having niche market segments. Are
you out of your mind?

Angels and VCs want 100x+ multiple exits. Business people don't need that, or
anything at all like it. What they need is a business with customers.

~~~
jholman
> Are you out of your mind?

I humbly suggest that this might not be the tone you ought to take, and it
might not be the tone you'd like to take.

~~~
tastybites
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2252152>

Here's an entire thread for you.

