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Comment by ericjang | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that their views on competition run counter to what YC / Peter Thiel advocate for in all startups - that is, avoiding competitive spaces and going for monopolies. Perhaps monopolies are necessary for huge growth and investor upside, but it should be made clear that there's obviously space in startups for modest goals like a nice PDF reader, and I hope their employees makes a reasonable living off it at the very least.

Not sure if their business model will work out (given the sad state of affairs that is the Mac App Store) but I liked that they were transparent about it.

On another note... the Vimeo ad they released https://vimeo.com/145400917 features a white, well-dressed man working at an empty desk with nothing on it but a macbook, coffee mug, iPhone, and Moleskine notebook. I find this marketing trope hilarious and want to amass a collection of such images. Is someone already curating such a thing?

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Make as many as you like: https://placeit.net/

Something I've been thinking about recently: does anyone think Slack followed Thiel's advice? It entered a space that already existed (didn't go from 0 to 1), with several competitors, solving a problem that was widely known (email is a broken way to get work done). Yet it's becoming a monopoly and will likely be a very valuable business. It seems like there can be tremendous value in making something really good when the existing solutions are not good, and that creating an extremely valuable business doesn't require doing something entirely new.

Thiel doesn't advocate for an immediate monopoly because the alternative _can't_ work, it's because it's _harder_ to get a startup off the ground in an already-competitive market

There's a lot of business advice that makes sense if you are a VC fund seeking to beat the market and that must "only invest in things able to return the entire fund" but that does not make sense if you just want to build a reasonable business. Hell, some of that advice doesn't even make sense if your goal is to build a very successful startup with a good but not quite "sure I'll take another airstrip on my island" exit.

Sometimes the domain specificity of advice is not immediately obvious from its context.

My office setup is almost exactly what you describe. Switch out the macbook for an imac and then add a height adjustable desk, some headphones, and a hydroflask.

The article though was pretty effective in making me want to try the app since I make a handful of pdfs and exporting from photoshop is a pain since I always forget the settings I want to use to make the file not gigantic.

But to your point, I kind of like the idea that people can make a business like this and eke out a nice income and have happy customers. It reminds me of a tooth whitening supply company I temped for a while back. They had 4 employees and were 100% happy with the number of customers they had and would get more via tradeshows, dentists liked their product, and the profits were really good. I imagine the owners knew that at a certain size managing the business would not allow them to live the lifestyle they enjoyed, so they just maintained it as is.

Well, PDF Expert can potentially bring $10M a year if we do it right. We just feel that the PDF experience with Adobe isn't great... And for people who work with PDFs that does matter.

Speaking about lifestyle business: we definitely decided not to do it. It's been 7 years, we grew to 85 people and 45 million users... that is why we are aiming for something that is much bigger and has much more impact! Have a look at Spark!

Here's to hoping you bring Spark to the Mac ;)

On PDF Expert, one feature I'd love to see would be an option to add links to sections of images in a PDF. That's the only thing I use Acrobat for, and it'd be incredible to be able to quit using it forever.

> I imagine the owners knew that at a certain size managing the business would not allow them to live the lifestyle they enjoyed, so they just maintained it as is.

This is what a 'small business' is. Not every entrepreneur is out to take over the world.

Thiel also forced entrepreneurs to ask what they think is true that others don't. With PDF apps, the answer was that there is a gap in between where they can provide a better experience. As you noted, it may not be enough to take on Adobe but it fulfills a niche from which the vision could become broader. See Dropbox who wanted to replace thumb drives and rewritable CD-Rs to popularizing the cloud storage consumer option with all its additional possibilites.

The best one I've seen yet is the twitter background for Salesforce's Desk.com

https://twitter.com/Desk?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Es...

If you look for more than a second, you realize nothing, absolutely nothing about it makes sense. It's insane.

I've been staring at that for 5 minutes and I can't for the life of me see what doesn't make sense. What doesn't make sense?!

Probably the lack of power going to the iMacs, which could also explain why they have to use their mobile devices instead... :)

You can succeed as a fast follower but you won't become a monopoly.

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