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Comment by blickentwapft | Hacker News Reader

I just saw, after over 18 months of off and on development, that some other company has exactly implemented my idea, minus one key feature. They did a really great comprehensive job.

After wailing and licking my wounds for a day I decided that just because they’ve done that doesn’t mean the game is over. I actually decided it was an advantage because I could just copy their approach to solving certain thorny UI challenges.

Also, it’s validation for my idea. Until I saw that I thought maybe the idea was just a pipe dream.

It’s dumb to drop a project just cause someone else did it.

Maybe programmers tend to give up when they see someone else did it because programmers think the code is the business or the code is the win or the code is the success or something, when in fact success is much more than the code.

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This. I'm in exactly the same boat. I had an idea, that I thought would be cool if it existed and that I knew I'd make a lot of use of, but wasn't sure if there was a real market for it. Recently another company launched something similar (a few key differences, but otherwise mostly feature compatible), and it got rave reviews.

So I'm looking at that as market validation, and have now actually started building my own project. I think it is quite helpful that I no longer have the uncertainty of whether the project can successfully sustain itself, since the market validation has already been done, and it looks quite obvious that the demand is there.

When I looked into starting a coding school, I realized something similar. Getting a curriculum is easy, getting a teacher is easy (I can do both and know how to outsource this as well). However, marketing the damn thing? That's hard.

In all fairness, it might be that a marketeer has the opposite view of this. This is how I came to realize that you need each other.

You need teams, eventually, maybe not in all cases, but definitely in a lot of them.

And do it early, marketing shouldn't be something you just sprinkle on at the end - there some things that make marketing easier that can be baked into building whatever it is you're building.

For the coding school idea, I imagine some level of referrals would be one of the first tools at your disposal - something that should be native to the product itself.

How do you mean native? Like student refs?

As in, you should build your User model with the knowledge you'll have referrers and referees, making the experience seamless from user touchpoints.

Often you see some marketing gimmicks overlaid onto the structure of the site with clunky integrations, you need to make it so that your product by design supports referring as a strategy for it to win out.

For example, Dropbox had their referral tech built in (refer someone, get free storage etc...). They set their product up to utilise their chosen marketing strategy effectively at the base level of the product. At least, it felt like it was ingrained.

Experience taught me the opposite: If nobody have implemented your product idea, most likely it is because there is no need for your idea. If you don't find any competition - quit. The way you are going to be executing on an "idea" is what counts. Seldom is the case that the first one implementing the idea is the one that ends up taking over most of the market.

Being too much behind a product idea is doubly bad, because an idea isn't a business. You need some plan for how that'll progress over time, or how does any delivery, licensing, or potential investment get managed?

I'm about 1.5y into a startup that's picking up steam, and I've stopped feeling worried about similar "ideas". We have a plan for who wants our product, what they care about, and how much they'll pay for it. We have an platform that can be used to support a plethora of unique marketable products. We have a sales team in place. There's so much more going on than the original "what if we used version control thinking with contracts and legal knowledge?"

You're probably right, if the main goal is to earn money. Still, it's also like telling Edison that he should quit looking for a commercially feasible design for an electric light bulb. We need both types of entrepreneurs and people, both the types who persevere in seeing an idea through, even if they're alone in thinking it's a good idea, and the types who "merely" improve on existing ideas and products.

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