Ask HN: What to do when someone else starts your dream business?

Ideas are easy, execution is hard. No matter how you look at it, you are better off today than you were before this company appeared.

You’ve got a few choices:

1. Contact them and get a job. If you’ve been thinking about this for years, you have domain expertise to bring to the table.

2. Use their funding and launch as leverage to raise your own money. If someone invested in them, that means smart money (all money thinks it’s smart) is going into the industry. Use that to raise angel/VC

3. Find another idea to pursue and wish these folks the best. They are making a go of something that, for one reason or another, you weren’t able to. Like you said, it’s good for humanity. Great.

But really, ideas are easy. There is not, nor should there be, any prize for having a good idea. Bringing a decent idea to market is far more noble than having the best idea ever.

I agree, these are great points.

I'm not asking for an award for "the idea" I'm saying it's frustrating that despite my best efforts I couldn't get the capital to execute it.

Getting capital is hard. Much harder than having an idea. (one day, when you are rich, and dozens of people a week are lining up to spend your money for you, you'll understand.)

As the parent says, ideas are easy. Executing them is difficult, and figuring out early that an idea is "out of reach" is part of the process to moving on to another idea.

Two annecdotes; A customer came to us with an idea, but no funding. We didn't gave the ability to simply do the work for free. So we went looking for funding, and also invested some time in the domain space. Short answer, _someone_ will make a mountain of cash from the concept on day. But who that is will be done what arbitrary, and will rely on a lot of luck. We gracefully left the project (and as far as I know so did the customer.)

Bear in mind that ideas are not special. I can have 10 ideas a day. Figuring out which to do, and which to let go is important.

After school it was "clear to me" that Energy would be a good sector. Alternatives to gasoline were the future. Solar technology, converting ICE engines to run on hydrogen etc.

I had no clear path into that area, and no real skills beyond "ideas" so I went into programming instead. Turns out I was 30 years too early. Now solar is huge, and electric cars are a thing. (ocean wave energy is still waiting for its day in the sun.)

But I don't regret passing on that career. I've had other ideas and done other things.

My point is - don't obsess over "one great idea". You had one, cool. Let it go, have another. Get a real job. Save some cash. Keep thinking. Practice the art of taking (small) ideas to market.

If you hold onto ideas loosely, another will be along soon.

I have a document I started several years ago where I journal ideas that I come up with. There are at least two dozen ideas in it. Some of those ideas were implemented into products/services by other companies.

Seeing this play out convinced me that ideas are easy, it is execution that makes them spread. Having been able to come up with so many ideas also gave me the confidence and reassurance that I could monetize one of those ideas. Eventually, I picked an idea from that list and started my venture.

So, my advice is -- do not be bogged down by the fact that someone else arrived there first. There are thousands of product / service categories where there are multiple players in the market. It just means that the idea is valid and others also see business value in the idea. You can focus on how you can differentiate your offering in terms of features, price, geography, support and so many other dimensions, if you wish to pursue the same idea.

What would you have done if the competitor came up after you had launched?

If you strongly feel there is no point pursuing the idea, there are other ideas you could pursue for your business.

Please don't beat yourself up and get frustrated. The world is a very large place with tons of opportunities, if you look hard enough.

Do you publish them somewhere? Interested in reading your ideas.

Not at the moment. It resides on a document on my hard-drive.

Just to share one idea that I almost took to completion and then dropped - It was a few years ago and Slack was the top collaboration suite. I had an idea for building a unified chat/messaging tool to integrate text, images, audio, video in a single collaborative tool. I used IPFS to keep the data distributed on the peer nodes (i.e., completely serverless and p2p). Microsoft Teams had just launched. I dropped the idea knowing fully well that Teams would soon surpass Slack (and sure enough they did recently).

A good thing that came out of that was I used the video part of the tool to pivot to a different product.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mfPHTWsFhzmcXw8ta/the-feelin...

wow, thanks for the great article. Good to see this is not a unique experience. Sounds like the author is basically saying, yes it happens and the way to get over it is to think of another idea - but retain some skepticism and emotional distance from it.

> it's even less likely I get the money I need to do so now.

It is a perplexing aspect of reality that every situation can be read + or -. Looked at positively, your idea is now validated by people betting money on it. This is something you include in your pitch to investors, and then also tell them you have had 8 years of deep thinking (did you?) about the business around the idea.

>> it's a net good for humanity.

"If you can't beat them, join them."

If it is a good idea and possibly lucrative, why not try to join the company?

When I see someone executing on my ideas I marvel at how multiple people can come up with the same idea independently, and I am reminded to execute on a future idea immediately or accept that somebody else will.

IMHO a good idea is not enough. It needs to be a good idea for you (for your situation, expertise). Without knowing you at all, reading about trading options to finance an idea seems like a red flag. Maybe there is a more approachable idea out there that is perfect for you.

That is just rough, and I’m sorry you had to go through it. What will make you a success is the maturity with which you’re handling the tough love on this page.

I was sympathizing until “I need hope that I’ll become rich.” Well, there are lots of ways to get rich, most straightforward being to get a tech job and work every day. But on the other hand if you really care about your idea I think you should write about it, join the company that is implementing it, keep researching it, keep loving it. I just can’t tell whether you really care or just want money.

Both, I want get rich doing something important. I don’t mean $300k/yr salary rich, I mean yacht rich.

What a bizarre combination of goals. I wish you nothing but good luck in your quest.

>the idea I've had for 7 years, that no one else thought of before, is now a company.

Depending on what that company is like, this could be very strong validation of your ideas.

>I want get rich doing something important.

Either one is usually out of reach for most people.

The most likely way to get rich is to be born that way, OTOH you can always start doing something important within your means.

How important can something be anyway, regardless of your means if it's important enough you're going to put in maximum dedication I would think.

That's the direction I would go right away within my power, and leave the being born rich to those whose odds are more in their favor.

>$300k/yr salary rich

>yacht rich.

Pretty soon you're talking some serious money either way.

So on first impression I would think neither one is exactly within reach in the short term if you're in financial ruin.

Also reminding you that nobody knows which would be the richer highwayman, whether it would be the yachtsman or not.

I would consider working for them as a salesman if they're decent since you were going to have to be a hell of a salesman if you had gotten your own company doing this same thing.

Might as well work on becoming unruined doing something where you've had the eye on the prize for so long, even though the necessary good fortune just did not line up.

Now that it's gone - I'm incredibly discouraged

It'd be one thing to have been defeated by a competitor, quite another to have never even gotten off the ground. Incidentally, losing money trading options is in no way a failed funding round.

Why don't you tell us what your idea is?

It's hard to recommend anything generic and anyway, it's no longer a secret.

There is Coke and there is also Pepsi. Both very successful.

Do you have a professional background in biotech or at least the life sciences?

Yes almost a decade