Comment by riskable | Hacker News Reader

Comment by riskable | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree with this sentiment:

> It is harder to build something today than it used to be.

It's SO MUCH EASIER! Are you kidding me‽ 10 years ago it was much more expensive to stand up some service on the Internet and the de facto frameworks of the time did not scale very well. Now it's so cheap (and easy) to serve something up to millions of users it's practically free.

Not only that but if you're building something that uses hardware we're sooooo much better off today than 10 years ago it's like night and day. Getting a PCB prototype made 10 years ago was expensive (~$500-1500) and it took a lot longer. Today you can get bare PCBs for less than $10 (within 100x100mm) and get them fully assembled for less than $50 (depending on the components, of course). Not only that but you'll have it in your hands within a week! It's astounding.

The software available for doing hardware design 10 years ago was expensive and the open source stuff wasn't that great. Today we have Kicad 6 which is awesome. We also have embedded Rust which makes adapting your existing firmware to new hardware a bazillion times easier than with C (which is what we were stuck with for the most part forever and ever).

There are some things that are much harder today than before:

    * Chip (and hardware) availability.
    * Real estate is *much* more expensive.  Though there's great deals on office space!
    * Gas/energy is MUCH more expensive...  But that shouldn't matter much to a software developer.

Author here, thanks for the perspective.

I’m absolutely on board with it being easier to build something today than ever before. SaaS, public cloud providers, billing platforms etc. all exist and are awesome.

My viewpoint is that it’s harder to build something original or financially viable. Sometimes it feels that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked hundreds of times, and anything truly significant is out of reach.

I‘ve had dozens of ideas I didn’t pursue further after asking myself „if this is such a great idea, why hasn’t somebody else already done it?“.

Maybe that‘s a loser‘s mindset ;-)

> build something original or financially viable

> I‘ve had dozens of ideas I didn’t pursue further after asking myself „if this is such a great idea, why hasn’t somebody else already done it?“.

You're conflating the two ("original" and "financially viable"). In my opinion, your mindset is fundamentally flawed. I'm not saying this in a negative way, I just mean that I've seen it before in others, and I myself used to think like you, so I can understand what you mean.

The truth is, clones make money. You don't need an original idea to be financially successful, at the 4 to 8 figure range. Indeed, if you simply want to quit your job rather than make billions, you should be in a market with many competitors so you can carve out a small slice of it. If you instead are building a whole new market, like Airbnb or Uber, you can carve out a much larger slice but that requires a fundamentally different way of working, ie raising lots of money, teaching your audience (before Uber, who'd get in an unlicensed stranger's car?), and marketing the hell out of your startup.

Instead, find a nice, large market with lots of competitors, and start building something. As you build, you will naturally find competitive advantages that differentiate you from your competitors. I also thought I needed to find something totally unique and original, ie an all new market, but I realized that was not the way to have success. Instead, I use an already successful market but then build something in those spaces.

See https://indiehackers.com for more info.

The product I’m building right now, which I’m referring to at the end, indeed also exists in an existing, competitive space.

You’ve given me something to think about, thanks.

Read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31352108

It talks about how the author waiting too long to ship and regretted it.

I think you have to just pick an idea you're passionate about and build it.

I've had the same thought before yet even here on HN I've seen many startups shared that feel like rehashes of past ones. But those past ones got acquired...

Now I believe in just build a solid product and attract customers/users.

I think they're valid points. A lot of people argue that it's easier than ever before just because the costs are lower, without factoring in many other crucial aspects like timing, competition, and so on.

The tools and operational bits are better and more available but the bar for what constitutes a viable product is much higher today. The cost and complexity of engineering done today would have been beyond the realm of practicality not that many years ago.

Engineering complexity grows to consume the capabilities of our tools. Incremental improvements in operations and tools doesn't offset the large changes in engineering sophistication required to build software that isn't a mediocre re-hash of something that already exists. The definition of "state-of-the-art" in database engines, for example, has moved so much in the last 15 years that the level of technical know-how required has become a prohibitive barrier to new products.

I agree with the article sentiment. The threshold for what could be considered a viable business was much lower 20 years ago. My first tech job doesn't even exist anymore because Squarespace et al have consumed the lower end of web development.

Granted, certain things like game development are a lot easier now.

Are these hardware cheaper than before mainly due to outsourcing, where are you making PCB? if it's from China it might not last due to the tension these days.

Another huge factor is how many kids do you have and how old are they? Age-45-or-50 might also mean that the kids are easier to handle so the parents finally can pursue something. For people that are very successful without kids, they live in a different world most of the time.

> if it's from China it might not last due to the tension these days.

Sure, but that's the future. Don't create imaginary problems to worry about: you'll find plenty that already exist that need to be dealt with right now.

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