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Comment by HarHarVeryFunny | Hacker News Reader

Is this just supplemental income, or are you actually making a living from it?

Isn't it a bit of a risk to tout the success of this idea among a tech crowd capable of going off and creating competitors?

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It's supplemental, but it's enough to make living where we live. When I first started, I worried about creating competition by sharing too much. But after 6 years of refining production, I've realized this product isn't easy to replicate at all

It's almost always the case that anyone who thinks something is easy to replicate will realize the product is the marketing, sales, creating/building, delivery, billing, and not just any tech.

Happy for you having a family activity.

Binding is a good skill to have, remember it from my school days.

I used to think tech was a small part of a startup. Now I think it’s a _very_ small part.

Small part of successful startups.

Those that focus more on technology instead of the product often fails, unless technology is the actual startup (database companies, PaaS etc.). Even then it is often a good choice just to select something "boring" that everyone knows.

How does your product differ from the Flipbook Photobooths that people have at their weddings? They're able to create flipbooks on demand that are very high quality.

I haven’t held a flipbook like that in my hands, but the main benefit of ours is that you can upload any video from your phone anytime - you don’t need to be at a wedding. The downside, of course, is the delivery time

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Guaranteed that others have thought of this. Execution is where you succeed or fail.

It strikes me as odd that so many people think a business has to be unique to succeed. 99% of businesses do something that another business already does. For that matter, almost by definition, most businesses are not the leader in their niche. That doesn't make them unprofitable.

But what about moats??? My business guru told me I need an ironclad irreproducible moat! /s

I understand you're joking, but I guess that depends if you are trying to monopolize a market, retain first-mover advantage, etc. I guess ability to execute is itself a type of moat, perhaps especially so when the potential competition would be other startups that are statistically highly likely to fail.

Still, I wonder how many head-on competing businesses of a particular category the market can bear before they start feeling it via competitive pricing pressure, lower sales and/or slower growth, etc. What if there were 2 more video-flipbook companies, or 10 more ?

Think the majority of the technical crowd overestimates the value of the idea, building something and actually getting and talking to customers. 99% of folks will do nothing about this.

> Isn't it a bit of a risk to tout the success of this idea among a tech crowd capable of going off and creating competitors?

Yes, this feels like perfect bait for people thinking they can do it better and stuffing a video into ffmpeg shouldn’t be that hard. It’s actually starting to make me want to try it myself too.

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