Hacker News Reader

Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

Many of us also fall into the trap of thinking that There Can Only Be One Product and if someone beats us to launching it, well then the game is over.

In reality, you can even launch products that compete with big boys like Facebook or Google due to their bureaucratic nature, hunger for only billion dollar markets, institutional knowledge blindness, etc.

View on HN

It's so funny that we fall into that trap, because Google and Facebook both usurped previous services in their domains. What's interesting is that there is a different category of ideas that is just "Facebook but slightly different" that genuinely won't succeed - but people tend to pursue those ideas more frequently, because they have seen proper execution lead to success, often missing that the proper execution was what mattered, not Facebook as an idea.

I wouldnt call it falling into a trap cause for most people Loss Aversion is pretty hardcoded behavior - https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/loss-aversion/ and there are a whole bunch of market forces that take advantage of it.

Falling into a trap = an analogy for the cognitive bias that is loss aversion.

in practice, yeah they can be only one product. ' Due to the SV playbook of using 0$ pricing to corner the market. some markets are inherently monopolistic. so yeah either favor the incumbent or favor the person, with the largest share due to network effects. network effects aren't priced effectively in the market. or neither accounted for in monopoly law. for examples look at the fight between uber / lyft / chinese ride hailing companies etc. Hence we need standardized data transfer policies or protocols.

The real problem is, these products are $0 and really good. I've seen countless examples of greatly-executed newcomers displacing the leading solution. Most knockoff services don't understand that they need to be genuinely, perceptably better than the competition to succeed. Easy example of a success story: Discord.

Or Zoom. They’re like the 8th try at this, but they crafted a product with much higher value, out of an old idea.

So true. The first implementation is not necessarily the best, and good execution can be at least as important as a good idea with mediocre execution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com