How HackerNews ruined my morning

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.

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.

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

Then one morning I woke up to this http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/10/facebook-open-sources-frien...

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Then do nothing.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.