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Comment by kyro | Hacker News Reader

If your entire business is based on searching another company's already searchable set of data by using the apparently ingenious method of prepending a "$" to search terms, and you've raised $8.6 million knowing full well that at any time said company who owns this data could implement such a trivial feature, then you're taking a stupidly ridiculous risk.

You can turn your feature/plugin into a company, but more than most startups, you should be incredibly wary of the prospects of those you're piggy-backing to duplicate your product. I had similar criticisms for Rapportive – Google could've "hijacked" their idea at any time. They made it out nicely, but the odds were really, really slim, and still are for anyone wanting to do the same.

I'm not saying don't go for it; just don't be surprised if and when your idea is copied.

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Nitpick: when you're raising $8.6M you're not taking a ridiculous risk, your investors are. Arguably you then have less risk, e.g. you can reliably draw a salary for several years even if your company isn't yet profitable.

Is this true? Will investors happily let founders draw comfortable salaries for several years? That doesn't sound right to me...

Yea, there are a lot of companies, pre sellout or pre IPO that will run for year and years without a profitable business model. To name one off the top of my head... Twitter.

I think this was the point he/she was trying to make:

  Will investors happily let founders draw comfortable 
  salaries

Do the founders really draw comfortable salaries during that run? If not then their risk is that they are 'wasting' their time at below market rates.

That's the problem with most of API apps of twitter. Twitter is a simple system. And if your are implementing a feature over Twitter via their api you are very vulnerable to this. Anytime twitter could implement this feature. Because you most probably have a user base of "small subset of Twitter's", you will have a great problem after all the users have access to this feature. This will make you the second competitor for the feature and move Twitter to leadership for it.

So building features over somebody else's API is a bad move. You have to build a business which is not solely based over a nifty feature you have implemented over somebody's API which could be hijacked in no time. Implementing features are easy, building businesses are hard and time consuming.

Not only was his business built on top of the Twitter API, but his "key feature" was merely semantics. I'm not even convinced he should get the credit for originality, Stowe Boyd published an article on the topic in July of 2009 [1].

Companies that rely wholly on a third-party API aren't sustainable businesses, they're hobbies and oddly they have become overfunded hobbies. Twitter's starting to put a lot of hobby-companies out of business.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20091015145325/http://www.microsy...

Companies that rely on a third-party API that they isn't contracted and paid for aren't sustainable.... if it's free, it can be taken away. Unless I'm missing something and he was paying twitter for this.....

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