Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

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hn_throwaway_99

> Let it be a lesson for anyone worried that “their idea has been taken” or “there already solutions for this” out there.

I have nothing but respect for Figma's tech, but I'm not really sure this lesson is generalizable to 99.9% of other people. By all accounts Evan Wallace has skills and talent the vast majority of software developers don't have and never will have. The reason Figma was able to succeed in this space is that their engineering team was like the 90s-era Chicago Bulls of software development.

And to emphasize, that's one reason I'm very happy for Figma's success. Figma didn't succeed because they "got lucky", or just happened to be in the right place at the right time, or had great marketing. They succeeded because they were able to create a brilliant technical solution to a problem that lesser engineers and engineering teams were simply not able to solve.

Yea I'm not trying to take away from any of that, nor provide generalized advice. Only addressing the crowd of people who will shy away from pursuing (or poo poo others) when their idea isn't some sort of original innovation that nobody's ever thought of before.

Every successful company had some sort of edge. Some sort of advantage that other companies in the space don't have. For Figma that was high level tech execution. For something like, say, LaunchDarkly, that was a killer enterprise sales team. For something like Liquid Death, it was pure marketing and positioning. Just to use some other examples of companies that launched into crowded spaces and succeeded.

It could be anything, but it's always something, and no advice should be generalized.

> The reason Figma was able to succeed in this space is that their engineering team was like the 90s-era Chicago Bulls of software development.

Huge contracts are built to extract as much wealth from the customer as possible without letting the victim know. Not by engineering talent. Huge contracts are what make Figma a success story.

That's such an unfair, pessimistic, and "economics-free" take. The giant enterprises with "huge contracts" as you point out are not "victims" - it's not like they're hapless newbies who don't know how enterprise contracts work. Especially in the case of Figma, where there are loads of competitive products (which was the point of the comment I was responding to), clients have plenty of other options. They chose and continue to choose Figma because they believe it gives them value over other possibilities.

I'm pretty sure almost nothing involved in building a multi billion dollar business is generalizable to even .01% of other things

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