

Ask HN: Did posting your startup in HN give you users or only competitors? - thisuseristaken

I can&#x27;t understand why anyone would want to post their startup in an early stage, when their codebase is probably quite small and easily clonable . Unless, of course, they want the professional feedback and brainstorming that this forum provides .
Did any of you who posted your startup here gain a decent amount of real users (clients) ?
======
iamwithnail
I've mentioned mine on here a few times, and it's picked me up a few users,
although i've never done a 'Show HN' type thing. Most startups, I'd hazard,
are specific enough in implementation, market and niche that you need to find
someone who cares enough about all of those same things _and has the skills,
time and wherewithal to land it_. Lots of people have ideas, few land them -
there are probably 50 teams working on the same idea as you, but most won't
land them. (On my example - the site's in beta, it's a soccer stats site so
probably barred in a lot of non-UK domains as gambling related, of niche
interest in any case, etc. My site's a clone/improvement, in many respects, on
others that I've used in the past - fixing my own problems.)

If you've got a world-changing, hugely scalable, easily copyable concept, then
yeah, probably don't post it here. But otherwise, it's all in the
implementation, and posting it on HN probably won't change that.

~~~
Mankhool
I echo this completely and I have done a "Show HN" and a "Share Your Startup"
on Reddit.

------
yellow_and_gray
Speaking openly about a problem is a sign of strength, not a weakness. It's a
sign of a weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.

You want to be educating people of what you are doing. Copying an idea has
little to do with the codebase being either small or clonable and more with
the people behind the idea. And I don't mean just about having courage. Ideas
by themselves are roughly worthless. There's no market for them. There's no
place where one can go and buy an idea.

Describing your idea in detail doesn't mean other people will copy it. First
they'll have to be convinced it's a good idea. If you ever tried to change
anyone else's mind you know by now how hard that is. Not even founders
themselves can predict how well their own ideas will do. Larry and Sergey
originally tried to sell Google to Yahoo for $1m.

And even if people are convinced your idea is a good idea, they'll still have
to compare it to the existing idea they are already working on and see which
one they're more likely to do well with. A better, more ambitious idea might
seem frightening. A simpler idea might seem more tangible. It could be at
least a year before one can convince themselves it's ok to let an old idea
die, and at least two years to pursue an ambitious one. Ambitious ideas really
are that frightening.

If you are not convinced choosing between two ideas like this is hard, here's
a simpler test that doesn't even involve a good idea. When you have only a bad
idea and no good ones, how long does it take you to stop working on it?

Regardless, good ideas will have competition anyway. You can't avoid it. So
actively working on the next step of getting feedback on what you have is a
sign you are strong enough to take the next steps, however small they seem, as
opposed to hiding to avoid competition.

Dropbox launched on HN
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863))
and their biggest gain wasn't the number of users they got from HN. Their
biggest gain was probably that they became less frightened by the idea of one
day evolving into a startup with 300m users.

------
satvik1985
I think the biggest disservice you can do to yourself as a startup is to be
protective about your idea and being afraid of getting cloned..

Ideas by themselves don't mean anything.. Its the execution of this idea that
makes for a good venture. I personally meet so many people who don't speak or
talk about their idea because they are afraid it will be copied. It just stops
them from getting help from others.

On the other hand I have been open about our startup idea and what we are
developing, and an amazing thing it has done for us, is the feedback it has
gotten us and more importantly connections to right places and people.

