Do you live under the fear that a YC company is about to demo what you working on?

There was a great article on news.YC the other day about some of intuit's reasons for success. This quote stuck in my mind:

"Your competition isn't other companies, but the way things are done now"

There were like dozens of other companies working on personal finance software, and the intuit founder instead concentrated on his biggest foe: pen and paper. And hey, if it's a big enough market, it can support many different companies!

No, don't worry about someone else making something. Worry about how fast you can make it yourself. Worry about your community of users. But try to keep track of your competition.

I have put a lot of thought into this. I was going to apply to the next YC class, and have had much encouragement to do so from my friends at google, however, I just got accepted to law school, and plan on continuing my project from there, maximizing the free legal advice I get from peers / professors.

Basically, from what I have read / researched / been told by people who-know-what-they-are-talking-about, competition in this field is actually a good sign:

1. It means that someone else has decided your product/service is worthwhile enough to actually spend the time and energy to develop it. 'No competition' is very often a good indicator of 'Bad idea' or 'No market.'

2. The market -- the internet market, anyway -- is vast. Facebook has 15M users, myspace 35M, linkedin 12.5, bebo 12.5... (plus or minus, who can even keep track anymore?). There is plenty of room for companies with competing services, especially if their products are marked by substantially different features and/or payment methods (or lack thereof).

3. Motivation: if I found out tomorrow that a YC company was doing exactly what I was doing, I would probably sleep less and try to get my product to market faster. Currently, there are a few competitors, but their services are either targed outside my demo or are, well, crappy. It is precisely the lack of the service that I am trying to provide that is my main motivation for working to bring it to market: I want to use it! Competition would validate that other people are thinking like me, and would also go a long way -- by using their product -- of understanding exactly what it is I am getting myself into.

I wish someone would steal my idea because then I could partner with them. It's so hard to find cofounders these days as we all know.

If you don't, try to convince yourself that you should. I've found paranoia to be a very effective way of beating procrastination.

I would wager that the chances of two separate startups producing detrimentally similar websites is negligible, unless you are working on a totally unoriginal me-too type site (and even then...).

[where 'detrimentally similar' is defined as 'so similar that the market can only support one of the two, assuming people actually want it']

If you have no competition, there might not be a market for what you want to create, so competition can actually help you out.

It's also possible to address similar sets of needs in different ways. digg and reddit are both successful. Live and let live. Namaste.

'YC company' is the new google

Sure I do. And I really worry if I find out that someone has done stuff well and completely when I've barely started.

But other than that, competition often just validates a market. God knows Google didn't care that Infoseek, Excite, and Altavista already existed. Obviously they were doing it wrong.