Ask HN: Someone released my startup before me - now what? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Someone released my startup before me - now what?

11 pointsasdfqwer123412 comments

Hi Folks!

Obviously this is a throw away account - but rest assured I am a regular poster / commentor here.

Like I am sure many of you have experienced already someone beat me to it. I started working on a new startup with some friends a month ago and we were hoping to launch around January / mid February. Its in a relatively untouched area of cloud data (I know everyone is doing something with data in th cloud but believe me this isnt something we found any options for out there yet). All I have been aware of is that 2 companies were working on something similar (one of which got funded recently too). Turns out in the last few weeks one of them launched - and has done a great job it seems with the UI and so on. No idea how they're doing so far in terms of acceptance and conversion and so on - but it certainly looks great - and feature overlap beween our products is pretty huge.

I dont know what to do now - on the one hand we have only a months effort behind us - and it wouldn't be too much to loose to go do something different now. But I do believe in our product and since the market is relatively untouched I dont think that it needs to be a monopoly. On the other hand I also believe that coming first isnt always the best way to win - but being better is. However considering we are far behind the competition at the moment - I really wonder if it would be a good idea to get in here or not.

I would really appreciate and advice or experiences that fellow HN'ers have made in such situations - especially success stories.

What would you do in my position?

Thanks!!

I like the other posts. Another thing you could do is break the market down even further. Find a niche that the other companies aren't serving. Serve that customer better than anyone. Then when you "win" the majority market share for that niche you can expand (a la crossing the chasm).

You might also go all out lean on these mo fos and put up a landing page, then start reaching out to customers and have one on one conversations to see if anyone will even buy your product. There's nothing like a real life customer willing to buy your product to get you back in the right mindset.

Exactly; it's not so much about building a "better" product so much as being able to find a key differentiator (though to be fair, overall quality WOULD be a strong one).

If it really is a good idea, then you're going to be launching in a crowd and "first" might not mean that much(1).

The question you'll want to ask is "can we do this better than everyone else who has launched or will launch right after us?" If you're not sure you're going to be the best, don't bother. It won't matter if you're first, third, or seventeenth to launch if what you launch is second best.

(1) You might not want to show up a year late though!

It doesn't matter when you get there (well, unless you're so late that the market is flooded and it's impossible to get your name out there). If you were to be first to launch, they'd come after you with overlapping features. Then what? And what about another company that comes to try to take advantage of the same space? And another after that...

If it truly is a good market, it will be crowded soon. As long as you aren't entering a crowded market (and one competitor is not crowded) than I'd go for it. This assumes you can do a better job than the competitor and have something to differentiate yourself with. If you are truly overlapping than pivot. Hell, even a change in your marketing strategy alone could be tremendous. Just differentiate through the way you position and brand your product.

You do have only a months work into this, so feel free to abandon it. However, if you get into the habit of abandoning anything where you're not first to the market... I can only assume you'll never go towards anything because, let's face it, what are the odds you'll ever be first in something entirely new? Very slim.

I don't think it's too be an issue. You now have a chance to look at what solutions the competition has thought of and now you can incorporate and improve on some of their better features. Also if your products are very similar, as you say, it will probably fall mainly on your marketing to who is more successful in the long run.

I agree with most everyone on here and want to add two more points:

- google was not the 1st search engine - intuit was the 40th company into the small business space

Look at them now.

Evaluate. Test. Learn.

I would see this as validation and simply carry on while learning from their mistakes. Also the day you launch you'd be exposing yourself and the idea greatly, so a month before or after means nothing.

    I returned, and saw under the sun, 
    that the race is not to the swift,
    nor the battle to the strong,
    neither yet bread to the wise,
    nor yet riches to men of understanding,
    nor yet favor to men of skill;
    but time and chance happens to them all.

I would assess the strength and execution of your competitor's product, then decide whether you think you can build a better product. Google didn't quit building a search engine because Yahoo beat them to it. They just figured out a better way to do it. Depending on the potential size of your market, there may be room for multiple companies, even if you do come to market second.

On the other hand, one month's work is not very much and if you have another great idea in a more promising market, I would say get working on that and try to make sure you get there first. But, like I said, it's not when you launch, it's how your product compares with competitors. Just my $0.02.

The surest road to "better" is often simply to optimize for a different segment of the market.

True. And, if possible, eventually expanding into the original segment is always a possibility. It's all about finding an untapped niche or one that needs some new tapping.

There was a great conversation at: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2931368 with regards to a similar issue with another member here on a throw away acount.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com