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Comment by obilgic | Hacker News Reader

I wish people(hackers) would spend same amount of time building and marketing/selling their idea. Unfortunately, i think its human nature, it is always easy to start with the fun part, and give up when the steps need to be taken become uninteresting/difficult.

Hackers love creating stuff, but when it comes to the selling that idea to their potential users, they dont have enough energy.

Hackers vs entrepreneurs?

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Possible. Its also part of the trough of sorrow. Its hard to remain motivated when nobody is paying attention to you.

A lot of websites I liked using that launched at the same time I did on HN are now dead despite my asking to pay to use them. slowcop.com is one that springs to mind. I used that damn near every day and still miss it.

I wonder just how much success (small and large) can be attributed to just continuing for years till it actually works.

Maybe people just underestimate how long it takes to actually get traction.

Out of curiosity, what service/activity did slowcop offer?

Sorry about the late reply. It was somewhat similar to YSlow for Firefox. I always thought it had some potential because the implementation was so slick.

No worries. I think Google also has a competitor to slowcop (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/) so it could be they figured it wouldn't make any sense to try to charge.

They were offering all sorts of other services though. The ability to rerun after a deployment and get the comparison, daily/weekly/hourly reports and other services.

I really liked the idea, but as you say I can see how they wouldn't try to compete with Google. That said though considering the Reader fiasco they might have been perfectly positioned had Google decided to shut it down.

I absolutely agree. I have fallen into that trap a number of times. The latest was indeed with Fork the Cookbook. Some bloggers filed a DMCA request (fun fact, recipes cannot be copyrighted, so they essentially were perjuring themselves). It sapped so much energy from our marketing and coding efforts, that 3-4 weeks later we're still recovering - took ages to convince ourselves that it was still worth doing.

There's always a first time I guess

Of course recipes can't be copyrighted, but you running into this issue proves just how much you screwed up at trying to understand your audience. Don't blame them for filling DMCA requests, blame yourself for not building something that they'll want to use and contribute to. Think about it for a minute. Does Github grab your source code without asking you and then offers people the option to fork it? No! Devs upload their source code to Github because they get a value out of it. The same goes for food blogs or anything else. If your target audience can't get any value out of your product, then you're dead before launching. As devs, we need to keep this in mind: people won't care if they can't get value. Just because it took you days/weeks/months/years/decades to build does not mean it will produce value for anyone. Only studying your target customers and building on top of this knowledge will.

For what it's worth, I just discovered your site and i find the overall design and experience awesome. It's light, clean, pro, has some fun elements and a bit of a nicely integrated branding which is cool (the forking idea). Well done!

Well, there is nothing bad with this. Many people enjoy producing some proof of concepts, but polishing and making a product out of it is another (possibly boring) thing.

Think of it as a recreational activity, along with spending time with family, reading books, watching movies...

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