Hacker News Reader

Comment by krisgenre | Hacker News Reader

Haven't watched the full video yet but the saying that one shouldn't build what everyone else is building doesn't seem like good advise.

Yahoo was hugely popular when Google launched. Orkut and MySpace were very popular when Facebook launched. There were many popular messaging services when Whatsapp launched.

In fact I think just digging out something from the Google graveyard would be a good idea. 4-5 million users might be a pittance for Google but most of us would be more than happy to have even half of that customer base.

View on HN

Yeah. It's actually also against what Peter Thiel says: Be the last to enter market, to do things right I guess. Another counterexample seems to be note-taking apps. Even though this is something native to many OS, there seem to be a couple of successful players: Notion, Bear, Roamreasearch. If you solve a relevant problem for people, who cares if something similar was available before but not solving the problem?

On a larger note: There's is so much contradicting startup advise out there it almost feels useless. Dunno, maybe those people who have the real insight are just to busy to share

> It's actually also against what Peter Thiel says: Be the last to enter market

He also said:

"Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them."

Regarding note-taking apps, I think few of those will turn into billion dollar companies, which is what the video is about.

Yes, and that's exactly my point. There were search engines before there was Google. Still it has become a multi-billion company. If you provide 10x value no one cares if there is competition already (depending on switching costs I guess).

Certainly you need to consider both supply and demand, and how fast both are growing. Ignoring any of these variables turns your prediction into luck. You need a way to assess their relative size. Looking at how successful others in the market currently are is actually a pretty good way to assess this. Except if their high margins may be based in large part on factors you can't benefit from, like network and monopoly (e.g. IP) advantages.

That's kind of the case for all this kind of big-picture advice. There's some truth but some missing variables that may be just as important. "Bread crumbs" was a good way to describe it, I think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com