Where by 'we' I mean 'I'. It's completely my fault that RedLaser was allowed to win this market. I killed the project.
It's nice to see that we were at least somewhat correct on the general goodness of the concept, though.
Congrats, and nice work, guys.
Unfortunately, I can't find your email address :-)
If you want to contact me, kevin at massive.io.
In one of his essays ( http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html), pg talked about the fact there was no such thing as a million-dollar idea and that "The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless."
Startup ideas are worthless in the sense that you're almost certainly not gonna be able to get anybody to pay you for one. If you want to prove that they're worthless in any other sense -- in particular, if you want to prove that you can't improve somebody's chances of succeeding in the startup world by giving them a good idea -- you have a lot of work to do. In fact, I bet you can't do it, because I don't think it's true.
Now, I have almost no experience in this area -- my conclusions are mostly a priori. But I don't think anybody else really does either, and in particular I don't think Paul has actually seen enough startups succeed or fail to judge the value of ideas. How many YC startups have "succeeded"? Depends on where you set the bar, but at this point in time the answer's somewhere between "not many" and "none".
And I'm kind of surprised that you're using this as an example of how idea doesn't matter; in my eyes, it's just the opposite. This succeeded because it was a great idea executed decently, not because it was a decent idea executed spectacularly.
I didn't discuss whether the execution was spectacular or not and I didn't discuss whether the idea was great or decent.
on (a), as a matter of fact, this thread proves that the idea was not unique on (b), as a matter of fact, the difference between the guy who had the idea and succeeded and the other guy who had the idea can be boiled down to one thing. I also suspect that hundreds of other people had the same idea. Again, what distinguished them from the guy who succeeded is simple. One guy executed, the other guys just had the idea, but didn't execute (either because they were incapable of execution or because they had other priorities ...)
We started down the path of developing a Google Latitude-like system before Latitude had been publicly announced. Our prototype apps quite literally had the same workflows and functionality that you'll find today in Latitude. So, when Google announced their intention to release Latitude for the iPhone, we killed the project.
Fast forward to today, Apple blocked Latitude from happening on the iPhone and if we'd put in another month or two of work we may have been successful. What's the moral of the story? I guess I might not stop executing in the future just because it looks like the market isn't viable or someone big is poised to eat my lunch. Then again, that could be a recipe to end up penniless or hungry.
sorry all the same.
If I'd simply had the idea (not the idea plus all resources required for successful execution), there'd be no twinge.
If only we had met...!
That said, I think RedLaser as it exists now is a "one time thing." It's a product, not a company, and they're going to have to pivot into something more sustainable than "download this app."
So $1MM is great, but not as great as $1MM/year.
Microsoft manages this by charging for frequent and expensive upgrades, plus OEM deals. That probably won't work for an iPhone app.
There are lots of interesting ways they can go, however, so I am a little jealous that they're in such a great position.
Of course Occipital has other things brewing as well :)