Me & my co-founder started working on an idea 4 months back we are 50% into it. And two days back I stumbled across a post about another startup/product which had a same product(approximately it is a 90% overlap). This previous start-up ran for around 2-3 years, and was eventually bought by Google for rumored 10+ mil $. Google had shutdown the product(tech pundits commented that it was basically acqui-hired), Also founders have a patent about how they technically implemented the idea. The product was widely used and had an install base of 100+ mil.<p>Me & my co-founder are not co located, and are working. This weekend I am travelling to meet him and decide the future course. Thought of getting some advice from HN community first. Please advice if you would continue with development, or start looking for another problem to be solved(Idea).
An answer from a guy '
Matthew Kane' at Quora - <a href="http://www.quora.com/Startups/Copying-an-acquired-closed-Startup-Need-Advice" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Startups/Copying-an-acquired-closed-Sta...</a><p>"My advice would be to reach out to the team who had the startup which was acquired and get their feedback. They will be able to tell you if what you are doing is worth pursuing, if there is still a need in the market, if there are any legal/IP issues etc. I wouldn't waste anymore time on the project until you have spoken to them. They should be more than happy to help especially considering they already have exited their investment and are locked up at Google"
two questions you need to ask yourself:<p>1. did google kill the project for a lack of potential or did it just not fit into their larger picture?<p>2. are you bringing something to life (i.e. killer feature) that the other project didn't have?<p>just so you know sometimes a project can be too ahead of its time. sometimes someone can do a very similar a few years later and have a real hit: a good example would be that founder of zynga first did a social networking site like facebook (tribe.net) which failed: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pincus#Career" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pincus#Career</a>