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Ask HN: Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original

25 pointsbrandon27250 comments

I recently came up with an idea for a web app that I've been getting pretty excited about. I've been spending the last couple of weeks doing research and today discovered that another company is already executing the idea. Not only are they executing it, but they're doing a pretty good job of it.

How important do you consider the originality of an idea to be? I have decided to embrace my variations on the idea, the size of the market, and go ahead with developing it.

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The general idea doesn't need to be original at all. There was search before Google, social networks before facebook, video before YouTube, etc.

Sometimes the specifics of the idea can be important though. For example, take Google: lets use hyperlink data to rank websites

What's your idea?

"social networks before facebook"

You are saying that like the world uses only fb. You should do a reality check

downvote me more I enjoy down votes when I am right

Happy to oblige!

It's not a matter of being "right." It's a matter of your comment not being relevant and sounding unnecessarily argumentative.

If anything, Facebook's growth is more impressive than MySpace's. MySpace did it with no real competitor, Facebook did it with MySpace in existence.

I just had the best laugh of the day - thanks!

I think he was just trying to make a point. Showcasing a successful company that derived from a non-original idea. He never inferred that FB was the end-all be-all social network.

you know when you put Google in the same list you send that feeling . .

I would guess that fb's market share is close to google's and youtube, or at least will be soon based on current growth patterns. I may be wrong.

You're wrong now. FB's market share is almost certainly below 50%. They're a tad larger than MySpace, and there's also Hi5, Bebo, Orkut, Ning, Friendster, etc.

And their market share in the developed world isn't even in first place, and they're not even growing significantly faster than MySpace there.

Also, Google makes more per pageview by far than their 2nd place competitor, Facebook makes substantially less than MySpace. If anything in the social networking wars, MySpace is Google.

No you don't. If you were paying at all attention to the context of the post, he was listing sites were are successful but who's ideas had already been implemented. Facebook may not be as successful as Google, but it needn't be, and your assumption that your comment is in any way relevant to the discussion suggests a severe lack critical thinking skills.

who determines what is relevant? This is democracy and i αν allowed to comment any aspect i want. get a life and learn the basics of respect when you grow up

You are saying that like the world uses only Google. You should do a reality check

Idea is nothing without execution. So, it's glad that you are determined to continue working on your idea. And, you should be happy that at least you are now working on an idea that already has its market.

If you are working on a totally new idea, it means you are trying to explore a totally new market. And, thing tends to become even worse if your web app are trying to shape new habits among people.

And, if I were you, instead of spending time working on the research, I would rather spend the time start working on the idea. You may already a prototype right now if you started working on it the last couple weeks.

But, I do not mean that research is bad. But, I will try to keep the research time as short as possible. And, I agree with aneesh, try to keep your idea as specific as possible.

Besides, I assume that you are working on your idea alone, so, it is always good to target a niche market.

Truly original ideas are terrible things to base products on. It takes people a vary long time to accept things that are actually revolutionary.

Instead, its often better to just take something familiar and make it better or adapt it for a certain niche. Make an ipod, not a segway.

We like to believe in creation, but what's actually happening is evolution, not creation. Original ideas are like genetic mutations of old ideas and are not strong enough to survive and win.

I think that the strongest ideas are never really original, they are just better implementations of the existing ones.

In other words: you can't create in a vacuum.

True. Something copyright law should realize.

I agree. It's better to improve something in a proven product/market category. Save the revolutionary stuff for later.

As you're coding you'll definitely do things differently. You can even learn from your competitors mistakes, because you can regard their product as your "prototype". And because you have a competitor you can be pretty sure there is a market and (potential) customers. This is a good thing.

There are always a million reasons to not go through with something. If you're excited about the idea, and if you're pretty sure you can turn it into something profitable there's no reason not to go ahead.

We had the same problem. We had a 50% original idea, and our competitor was the rest of the idea that we knew could be better.

We used it as a basis for solving disagreements. Whenever we couldn't agree or decide what to do, we just say "what is our competitor doing?" It isn't about copying per se, it's about keeping momentum and getting past decision problems.

Go down a street and you'll see McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, In-N-Out, Jack In the Box...

And one of them is surely doing better business than the rest. ;)

the recent t-mobile offer for customers also proves this: its the same phone call but just with a different operator whom you'll hate when tmobile gives such offers :)

I wouldn't mind owning any of them.

If they're doing a good job of it more or less the way you'd be doing it, bail. You want to be crusading for your future users, saving them from the crap they would have to put up with if you weren't helping them. If you don't think you are making a big difference for your users, you won't have the necessarily inner fire to win.

Ideally you do a startup where other companies are doing something badly, their users hate them, and they still make money.

I would postulate that some details of the potential competitor's execution is different from what you envisioned for your app. This difference may be what makes one app more successful than the other.

Try to figure our what the core perspective of the other app is; perhaps it is subtly different from your vision - assess whether you believe your core concept is "better" than theirs.

If someone else has already executed it and made a pretty decent job of it be happy. Now you know there's a market, and that there's someone you can learn from.

It is very rarely the unique idea that wins. It's the implementation and execution.

That being said, being able to do something differently matters. Especially if you are in a niche market, it is much more difficult to get and keep traction without first-mover advantage.

Innovation in the way you will get traffic is one of the ways to distinguish yourself. If you are a paid service, consider integrating better commission/affiliate systems. They work.

Palish has some useful advice:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=365962

Also, consider that if that German hadn't invented the automobile, Ford still would have. i.e. Ford wasn't inspired by that German, because he was already working on an automobile. His autobiography is very good: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/hnfrd10.txt*

I have decided to embrace my variations on the idea
Yes. It's not the "same" precise idea - maybe, the same concept. And you'll see more as you go along:
I find my creativity is very local. I have to be at a new vantage point, to see new things. That is, to have a prototype, to play with it, to hear what problems people have - just to know more.
My experience: I began with one concept that seemed really cool to me, I did a little research and saw things vaguely similar, but they didn't get "my" idea (fortunately for me, I didn't find the several attempts that did get my idea). But as I began executing, I hit a roadblock - something that really spoiled my idea, made it impossible to realize the cool vision properly. I asked around, dejectedly, and someone suggested I look at how an unrelated project solved that particular problem - I did that and found the solution! But then bizarre twist 1: through doing this, I came to realize that the "unrelated project" was really doing exactly the same thing as me - just in a different sense. I would not have seen this connection (and did not) until I was intimidate with the details (i.e. was at a new vantage point). Bizarre twist 2: the title of my project perfectly described both my old conception and my new conception, although I could not see this ambiguity til after the journey.
Take the journey. You are surrounded by opportunities you cannot see.
Also: "What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?" http://ycombinator.com/app.txt (is there access to a more recent application form?)

Write a list of all of the companies/products that you admire. How many of them attacked a new market or idea? Ipod? Google Search? Google Adwords? WordPress? Facebook? Microsoft? Starbucks? Walmart? Ebay? Craigslist? YouTube? HackerNews (!)? None were the first to try what they eventually succeeded at.
Seriously, unless the other folks are literally owning the market, keep chasing it. Most markets have plenty of room for multiple successful players.

How important do you consider the originality of an idea to be?
Incredibly, emphatically, overwhelmingly unimportant. In fact, I would say that if your idea was truly original, that would be extremely worrying from a business standpoint.
In fact, I wrote an article on that topic:
http://inter-sections.net/2008/08/26/bad-bloggers-copy-great...

I'd be careful with some of the advice in this thread.
Your idea doesn't need to be original, but your execution of it needs to be better. In at least some small way that will gain you customers, it needs to be better on day 1.

Ideas = worthless. Execution is everything. I have come across that statement in numerous articles and books by successful people. If you need proof, go to Marc Andreeson's blog and read his body of work. Multi-billionaires tend to know their stuff, and he is way more convincing than me.
Some argue that being the 5th or 6th entrant into a market is optimal. The first few entrants make all the mistakes with product development and marketing in the early months. They then make changes after learning from the mistakes they have made over time, and you benefit from their painful trial and error.
Originality goes way beyond product ideas though. If you truly want to build a business, you have to create a company behind the product. That consists of many, many systems, a founding team with business instincts and vision, and the panache to bring ideas to life and build a company culture with flair. Everything has to be built from scratch. For my company, I see the products as one small part of who we are and what we do. Zappos calls themselves a customer-service company that just happens to sell shoes. If the shoe market goes to hell one day then they can take the business system they have built and pursue other markets. The value is in systems and top talent to run the systems, not inventions. Ideas are a dime-a-dozen, and we all have too many interesting ideas that we can't get to for lack of time. Systematic, consistent execution will make you that million bucks. If you have made it this far in the post, I highly recommend Michael Gerber's book called "the E-myth". It addresses why most small businesses do not succeed, and it has probably been the most valuable knowledge I have ever acquired. Also, check out sequoia capital's idea page, and see if your idea passes their test.
Now go out and execute!
Take your best idea, run with it, and make everything up as you go along.
is defined as having a unique spin on a product/service with a proven market, stunning marketing materials, and silver-tongued salesmanship

Wow, you've got a ton of great and positive advice here. I agree with almost all of it, but would add this...
There are no shortage of ideas, and no shortage of businesses to build if you have the ideas. If the company/market you are looking at has a good implementation with market penetration and barriers to entry, and if you can't SIGNIFICANTLY make a difference, then maybe keep looking. Take a read of Rick Segal's current post (and my comment there). http://ricksegal.typepad.com/pmv/2008/11/features-of-the-wor...
So, your final sentence says it all... go develop, you'll learn a ton going through that process and maybe find more ways to differentiate and improve on the market.
Don't forget to let us know when you launch.

pg also says that many ycom startups have changed businesses completely as they go along - and for applications, the initial idea isn't really evaluated as itself, but as a measure of your ability to formulate/recognize good ideas.

I agree with everyone here who says its possible if done with variations and served better.
But I am stuck in a similar situation. The worse part is to get the users of the competitor's service switch to mine. Coz the competitor has a huge chunk of data that's of value to the user. How do i urge the users to switch when the competitor doesn't have an API to access the user's data? If he had it then i could've built an app to import user data from the competitor's service.

That seems hard, but aiming for getting new users to sign up with you instead of them is probably easier. (Unless you are close to market saturation.)

Sorry for the self-link but I provided a list a while back of about 20 successful products that were not based on original ideas: http://firewatching.com/ambient/2008/06/06/products-that-wou...

I don't really think ideas are worth that much. Anybody can come up with an idea. What is, "I have an idea to build a fusion power plan to supply all of the World's energy," worth? Not much.
The value of any idea is the execution of that idea. In the world of software its the implementation of that idea. If your competitor has done a kick ass job implementing the idea you thought of and you really don't think you could do a much better job, I would probably look for other ideas that you feel you could do better.
Another thing to look at is the capability, velocity, and momentum of the competitors idea; you may be able to out maneuver them if it took them a long time to get to the point they did and they suck at software development. If they are kicking ass and getting funding to add more resources and move faster, this could make your life harder.
That said, don't do a feature-by-feature copy of the competition. That adds absolutely no value to the world and you're going to have a hell of a time escaping their shadow. Plus it would make you a slimy person its just really bad PR.
One of our competitors is copying us feature-by-feature and it actually puts us to an advantage because they don't understand why we did what we did and our software development delivery is much faster and higher quality than theirs.
How do we know this? Just by looking at their web page source. They have all of this test javascript code and fixtures mixed in with their production javascript, they use tables to control their page formatting, left /phpinfo.php on their root web server, use Dreamweaver to code their PHP and image roll-overs, and push everything out via FTP on port 21. Who the hell does that? On top of that they haven't delivered any new features in the past 4 months.
At the end of the day, very rarely are ideas original. You're better off focusing on the execution of an idea and out-delivering the competition.

It's 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration.
If you sweat harder and sweat smarter than the other guy, you'll clean house.

I consider it a kind of validation of an idea to see that other people are working on the same thing, but I know how you feel. It depends on your product and market, but I think there's pretty much always room for more than one success story.

Having another company doing successful business with your idea means that there is a market, which is a very good sign. There is no shame in not being #1 in a niche. Success does not have to mean overtaking the world.

There are virtually no totally original ideas. Its one of the reasons for the "ideas are worthless" mantra around here. Execution is the key.
You will never think of something totally unique. Just do it first, better, or cheaper.

If you don't have competition, your idea has no industry.

yet...

One advantage is you need not validate your idea because it being implemented successfully by another company.

The World is big, the market too.

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