Ask HN: Are you put off building something because it already exists?

Here&#x27;s the recommendation I give to students when they ask me this question (it&#x27;s a common one!):<p>You come up with a brilliant idea, you obsess over it, you Google some info, and on your screen lies your idea, being done by someone else, for the last two years. You’re all too familiar with that sinking feeling in your stomach that follows. You abandon the idea almost immediately after all that excitement and ideation.<p>First (as already mentioned), existing solutions prove your idea — their existence proves that you’re trying to solve a real problem that people might pay to have solved. And it proves that you’re heading in a direction that makes sense to others, too.<p>Second, and this is the biggie: The moment you see someone else’s solution, you mar and limit your ideas. It suddenly becomes a lot more difficult to think outside the box because before, you were exploring totally new territory. Your mind was pioneering in a frontier that had no paths. But now, you’ve seen someone else’s path. It becomes much harder to see any other potential paths. It becomes much harder to be freely creative.<p>Next time you come up with that great idea, don’t Google it for a week. Let your mind fester on the idea, allow it to grow like many branches from a trunk. Jot down all of the tangentially related but equally exciting ideas that inevitably follow. Allow your mind to take the idea far into new places. No, you won’t build 90% of them, but give yourself the time to enjoy exploring the idea totally.<p>When I do this, once I do Google for existing solutions, I usually find that all the other things I came up with in the ensuing week are far better than what’s already out there. I have more innovative ideas for where it could go next; I have a unique value proposition that the other folks haven’t figured out yet. But had I searched for them first, I never would have come up with those better ideas at all.<p>Finally, I’ll say this: if you see your idea has already been done and you no longer care about it, then it probably wasn’t something you were passionate enough about in the first place; it was just a neat idea to you.

A while ago, I was in the same boat. Why try to recreate GitHub, or Uber, or Salesforce, or Facebook? And once I discovered any competitors in my idea&#x27;s field, I would chalk it down to &quot;not worth trying&quot; and call it a day.<p>But then I realized, if my town can have 3-4 Chinese restaurants with the same exact menus (probably supplied by the same exact distributors), and they&#x27;ve all operated continuously for over a decade....who cares about uniqueness? Sure, none of these copycat places are raking in millions, but it&#x27;s enough to support the livelihoods of the owner and all of his&#x2F;her employees, so who cares? Your business doesn&#x27;t need to be a unicorn to make you happy, as long as you&#x27;re happy with that outcome.<p>Of course, tech does not operate the same way as Chinese restaurants, and for that I point you to Accumulative Advantage:<p>&gt;Accumulative Advantage is when a small advantage at the beginning of something, such as kindergarten, becomes a little difference that leads to an opportunity that makes a bigger difference a bit bigger, and that edge in turns leads to another opportunity, which makes that initial small difference even bigger.<p>Put in context: You don&#x27;t have to follow the same path your competitors did. Uber&#x2F;Lyft poured billions into normalizing the concept of being driven by some stranger who uses the same app as you, so any new ride-sharing platform can spend that money in other areas. Giants like Microsoft have decades of technical debt they need to tackle; you can start building with 2019 libraries, 2019 paradigms (wouldn&#x27;t the cloud have been great for startups ten years ago?) and 2019 performance.<p>In order for the underdog to win, there first <i>has</i> to be an underdog. If you&#x27;re brave enough to start, you may just be brave enough to win.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;educationinnovation.typepad.com&#x2F;my_weblog&#x2F;2008&#x2F;12&#x2F;is-your-birthday-an-advantage-in-school-malcolm-gladwell-thinks-it-is.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;educationinnovation.typepad.com&#x2F;my_weblog&#x2F;2008&#x2F;12&#x2F;is...</a> (yeah, weird source, but I&#x27;m just trying to define the phrase)

I’ve had this feeling since I used my first Zebra label printer back in ... 2003? It wasn’t until 2012 I was working on the backend programming of Zebra printers that I realized Macs had very little support for designing and printing labels. I created a one off (as in still at version 1.0) native Mac app that used a transparent window and printed whatever was behind it. It is called LabelScope.<p>Fast forward 6 years and I come to this realization that the label printer software landscape hasn’t changed much at all. I start poking around Electron&#x2F;React and native node modules for USB, fonts, barcodes and ... a year later this app is born: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;label.live" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;label.live</a><p>The problem is, it’s really difficult to market. 95% of my users come from organic App Store search...<p>My competition is either the free software that comes with the printer or very complicated and expensive Windows software.<p>Yep, it already exists... but no one seems to be doing the “any desktop computer, any label printer” solution.<p>It’s been a fun ride so far.

It depends on the size of the total addressable market. If the size of your target market is big, even if there are bigger established players, there is always a chance for a small, nimble product to carve out a niche. Established players often head upmarket (especially if they are VC funded). This often gives an opening for a new entrant to capture some of the SMB market share.<p>An example closer to me: the search engine market is dominated by Elasticsearch, which is open source, extremely popular and is now even a public company. However, I decided to work on a small project called Typesense (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;typesense&#x2F;typesense" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;typesense&#x2F;typesense</a>) to try and carve out a niche (and perhaps charge for it later).<p>I decided to take a dive simply because of the size of the market -- search is required in almost every SaaS application, and there are plenty of downsides to ES that can be addressed with a nimble, alternative search engine. And that&#x27;s what I am doing :)

If you are put off, it&#x27;s a good sign you shouldn&#x27;t even try to build it. If you&#x27;re discouraged that easily, you aren&#x27;t going to have the desire or drive to stick with it.<p>Let&#x27;s go back in time 20-25 years. I was a wannabe game programmer, and every few months I&#x27;d get a stick up my ass to write a Doom clone, RTS, or whatever game I was playing at the time. I&#x27;d recruit a buddy or two from a chat room or messageboard. Even though whatever game was out there (Quake II, AoE) was amazing and something we&#x27;d never come close to, we&#x27;d start methodically planning out the game, star writing an engine, have some test art created...you couldn&#x27;t stop us. At least not at the start. Eventually we&#x27;d get distracted and go our seperate ways, but we still worked on the project like it was the most important thing in our lives for 2-3 months.<p>Back to today. I wanted to make a chess website, just something simple where you could login and play a game with other users. Mostly so my dad and I could play without being in the same room. I wrote a simple web-based chess engine, got about 75% of the way to what I would consider a &#x27;completed&#x27; project. Then I went to chess.com.<p>Now, I wasn&#x27;t planning on making something even close to that. No chat rooms, blogs, rankings...but seeing all the features on the site just sucked every last drop of motiviation I had. It didn&#x27;t help that my current site was basically playable and didn&#x27;t need much more work. But from that point one, every time I opened my project it just felt so futile.<p>I know that products evolve over time, and whatever Chess.com looked like in it&#x27;s first revision probably wasn&#x27;t anything special. But it&#x27;s like I knew that I would never even want to take it to that level, so I just lost every drop of motiviation I had at that point.

I&#x27;m a chronic wheel reinventor. If you&#x27;re trying to make money off of your project, your mileage may vary. However, I&#x27;ve found that there are plenty of good reasons to reinvent the wheel. Although I&#x27;d very rarely reinvent the wheel when I&#x27;m doing something for pay as that implies issues like deadlines and maintainability, I do it all the time for personal projects.<p>Professionally, I&#x27;ll write only the code that I feel comfortable that I understand and can maintain. Otherwise, I&#x27;ll look to third party open source code. Unfortunately, I have been bitten a few times recently by popular and well-maintained but poorly designed or tested libraries that include frustrating bugs.<p>In my personal projects, I like to challenge myself. I will choose to write any and all code that isn&#x27;t provided by the language&#x27;s standard library even if trustworthy open source libraries exist that I would use in a professional situation. I like to think of it as &quot;desert island programming&quot;. If nothing else, it has taught me interesting things about all sorts of domains I wouldn&#x27;t have otherwise sought to learn about. And that knowledge is worth the struggle when making it to market as fast as possible isn&#x27;t the goal.<p>There are other reasons for reinventing the wheel besides supplementing your personal understanding. Sometimes the licenses of the alternatives are inadequate. Of course, that&#x27;s a somewhat personal assessment. Sometimes the alternatives are poorly maintained, poorly designed, or have fundamental flaws or bugs. Sometimes it&#x27;s not that the existing software is bad per se. Oftentimes writing software involves trade-offs and perhaps the trade-offs the major library&#x27;s authors have chosen are different from what you might choose. Recreating it yourself can clue you in to these trade-offs and gives you the opportunity to explore different paths.

Mine is mostly a mental problem, I feel like my product will never be good enough compared to others. Even right now, I&#x27;m working on a simple website for a specific niche, but there&#x27;s already another website that does exactly the same thing. I feel like people will just think I copied there idea, or that they might have better content than me. It&#x27;s always been an issue for me, and because of it, I&#x27;ve never been able to finish anything.

I voluntarily entered one of the most saturated markets that I&#x27;m aware of. It&#x27;s literally a cliché to &quot;do a photo startup.&quot;<p>That rumbling dark cloud of well-funded, well-established competitors on the horizon, and (perhaps my mistaken) belief that I see gaps of sunshine where I can succeed, is one reason I get out of bed every morning and persevere.<p>That, and my wife needs the product. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.photostructure.com&#x2F;introducing-photostructure&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.photostructure.com&#x2F;introducing-photostructure&#x2F;</a><p>(forgive the Always Be Selling, please!)<p>It was common sentiment when I went through YC that many excellent ideas would be dismissed by investors due to perceived existing competition or absence of market. Only rapid execution, iteration, and customer feedback can actually determine if the idea has legs and can find product market fit.

There are two reasons for building something: 1. Money 2. Fun &#x2F; Learning<p>Both have good reason for building something even though a similar product might exist. Mark Zuckerberg didn&#x27;t look at MySpace and say &quot;Oh well, there&#x27;s already a social network where people can connect with each other. I&#x27;ll stay in Harvard&quot;. He saw MySpace and said &quot;I can do better&quot;.<p>For the learning side, it&#x27;s useful to build something despite its existence for gaining a greater appreciation for how that tool works. There&#x27;s a service I&#x27;ve used before called Cloud66, which is essentially a wrapper for cloud services like AWS. I liked it so much I decided to build a clone just to see how it all works under the hood, and after replicating it I realised the underlying technologies used to achieve this are pretty simple. There&#x27;s always good outcomes from building something, whether that be money, learning or just the joy of building something from nothing

There&#x27;s a large company (30000~ employees, market cap &quot;north of $3 billion&quot;) called Rocket Internet [0], based mostly (solely?) on the business strategy of building something that already exists.<p>Seeing how successful they are, it seems the &quot;uniqueness of a product&#x2F;service idea&quot; is not such an important factor as it&#x27;s commonly considered. Perhaps it&#x27;s more about the execution, how the idea is implemented - UX, marketing, etc.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehustle.co&#x2F;rocket-internet-oliver-samwer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehustle.co&#x2F;rocket-internet-oliver-samwer</a>

Any time I am talking to younger entrepreneurs about ideas they have that already exist in some fashion I give them a simple analogy to ponder over: Rice!<p>I tell them to take a look at the rice isle in the supermarket and ask themselves &quot;why are there so many varieties of rice?&quot;... it&#x27;s rice for goodness sake! How can one be different to another?<p>How can there possibly be a need for hundreds of different types of rice.<p>Even if you just pick one type, like white rice, there are multiple brands competing with something as simple as rice.<p>Every item on a supermarket shelf has earned the right to be there because people are buying it for different reasons.<p>Everyone is different: Some people only buy Uncle Ben&#x27;s rice at 4 times the price of the supermarket rice and others only touch the unbranded value rice.<p>It&#x27;s all marketing.<p>So if your idea already exists then it means there is probably a demand and you just need to find your angle and market it appropriately.

I have a history of taking on giants head on. Even I thought on so many occasions that what I was doing is insane and will never work, lo and behold, it did.<p>Currently I am building a simplified windows deployment system (fdeploy.com) which already exists but is no longer available freely. I want to change that.<p>My advice is: yes, do it. Give it a try, with most essential features and do not get lost in the details.<p>Deliver something and see if people want it. Anything. The sooner the better.

I am in the same boat, I started a side project a few months ago and released the MVP without looking too much into the competition. But it turns out there is a lot of it.<p>The reason I am not going to stop working on it is:<p>- I am learning a lot while developing the new features(using lots of different tech that I don&#x27;t necessarily use in my day job)<p>- it allows me to channel some creativity that I did not know I had<p>- it doesn&#x27;t cost me anything to run<p>- even if it fails I can always use it as a showcase of my skills if I decide to start job hunting.<p>At the moment my goal is to get 10 users. When I get there, I&#x27;ll re-evaluate how far I want to take it with this thing.

This reminds me of an old blog of mine.<p>&quot;The culture of Googling everything is diminishing innovation and critical thinking.&quot;<p>Person A: &quot;I have this great Idea!&quot; Person B: &quot;What is it?&quot; Person A: &quot;Well its ______ for ______!. Isn&#x27;t that awesome&quot; Person B: (Quickly googles on his phone) &quot;There are already X companies doing exactly that&quot; Person A: &quot;Ohhh...&quot;(Drops his head in shame and moves on&quot;<p>The most innovative ideas were mostly created by multiple people independently and not knowingly.<p>Do the lowered barriers to knowledge reduce our ability for critical thinking? How can we maximize the inherent benefits of the web; while minimizing these negative 2nd order effects?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dannysalzman.com&#x2F;second-order-google-effect&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dannysalzman.com&#x2F;second-order-google-effect&#x2F;</a>

I used to think that once a product was created it made no sense to try to produce another one. It&#x27;s not a valid reason not to try. If you can make the product better or have a way to monetize it then it&#x27;s a good idea to try.<p>The hardest way to succeed it to create a brand new product no one has seen since you have to not only find the market you are selling to but convince them that they need the product plus teach that market how to use the product. Something that&#x27;s expensive and time-consuming. So in a way having a product in the market is an advantage to someone that wants to compete in that area.

My $0.02.<p>If you feel like the problem exists, start building. But, if you think the problem is solved, then it makes no sense to proceed with it.<p>For a startup, people use your product because they have a problem to solve. It does not matter how bad your UI&#x2F;UX is, how drastically bad your flows are, if you are offering a solution no one else is, you will have users. It just needs to work. The more pertinent the problem, more the users will be annoyed if it does not work. Ideally, your idea should be one of the solutions to the problem, and the entire initial phase is there to establish two things: 1&#x2F; Whether your solution works? Can you find a unique solution for the problem? 2&#x2F; Do a lot of people really have that problem?<p>For example: If you want to get into ridesharing and taxi market today, it will be difficult. But there is an open case where the wait times and variability annoys a lot of people. That is, if I am taking an Uber, I dont know how long will I need to wait. The app says 5 mins, but can be anywhere between 5-15 depending on the match. Sometimes, I have waited for &gt;10 min and the driver cancelled and had to wait another 15. If some app can tell me exact time - or even let me schedule a ride - I would be happy to pay extra for that given it saves me the time and frustration. Not sure how many will have the problem, or it is good enough for others, but I will prefer a cab which allows me exactly this - even at a higher price point.

I&#x27;ve long been baffled as to why what I&#x27;m building doesn&#x27;t already exist. Sure it&#x27;s tough to actually design-and-make, but it&#x27;s basically a holy grail of computing that a ton of people have, I think, generally wanted since long before I was born.<p>The weird thing is that I often do find people working on similar things. Sometimes they&#x27;re historical projects I&#x27;ll find a Wikipedia article on, or sometimes they&#x27;re posted here on HackerNews.<p>Every time I see one, I think, &quot;Wow! That&#x27;s a lot like what I&#x27;m doing! How is this not a bigger thing?!&quot;. The initial surprise used to last a while as I started to dig, but further explanation tended to reveal that things weren&#x27;t as they appeared.<p>For an analogy, say that everyone&#x27;s still using horse-drawn carriages, not cars, to get around. Then, you want to invent a car. Then, you see what looks a lot like a car in someone&#x27;s lab or in a museum. Then it&#x27;s like, woah!, right? I mean, if someone already made a car, why are people still using horse-drawn carriages?<p>So then I&#x27;d look into the car and see that it doesn&#x27;t actually have an engine inside. Or maybe it&#x27;s got like a major piece of an engine, but still 80% missing.<p>Anyway, back to the thread&#x27;s topic...<p>If you&#x27;re building something that already exists, how sure are you that the thing that you think is a preexisting implementation actually does what you want your thing to do?<p>And maybe it does, and maybe your thing&#x27;s a replication effort. But, my experience has been that things that look the same are off. That I&#x27;d see something that I&#x27;d think to be a car, and then mistakenly assume that surely it must contain an engine, only to later find out it doesn&#x27;t.

I&#x27;ve been working on a project for the last 6 months, and this week the company will be founded. When I came up with the idea I barely googled it, I just assumed that if it existed I would know about it. A few weeks ago however, I found out that a version of the system I&#x27;m building exists already.<p>After the initial negative response I started to carefully examine my competitor&#x27;s solution, and the more I look at it, the more I&#x27;m convinsed that our system will outperform it big time. They apparently have technical problems which has stopped them from capturing market shares in the past 6 months.<p>If I would have found out about this other company 6 months ago, I would have never started working on the project. Thank god I did though. I have learned so much about web and app development, I have expanded the idea of what I&#x27;m capable of, I&#x27;m about to found a company (which of course anyone can do but feels super exiting for me :D ) and I actually have a shot at making it fly.<p>It is always better to do something than nothing.

Just because something exists, doesn&#x27;t mean it can&#x27;t be done better, faster, smarter, cheaper. In fact it&#x27;s usually a good sign that someone else built it first because it may indicate a valid market.

Competition is the fun part! Once you see existing products&#x2F;services, you can use them as a proxy to validate some aspects of your idea, but also study from them to see what they&#x27;re lacking:<p>- Perhaps the service isn&#x27;t able to meet 100% of the user needs, maybe because some users jumped onto that product because it was the closest (but not perfect) solution to their problem. Or maybe the company grew too big and lost focus&#x2F;decided to ignore the needs of a few because they moved up.<p>- What about the non-technical parts of the product&#x2F;service? Sometimes you can differentiate by user experience (the note-taking app &quot;Notion&quot; is a really good example of this, and totally swept me up. Kudos to their team!).

At the end of 2006 I decided to build a job search aggregator. After 2 months of developing a prototype I found out that indeed.com and simplyhired.com already implemented job aggregators for ~2 years.<p>So, instead of continuing with job aggregator - I decided to build a job board (postjobfree.com)<p>My job board grew OK, because indeed.com and simplyhired.com sent us organic (free) traffic for couple of years.<p>But then (~2009) Indeed and Simplyhired started to charge job boards money for the traffic, and then refused to send even paid traffic to job boards (~2012).<p>In addition to that, Japanese &quot;Recruit&quot; holding bought Indeed in 2012 (for $1.2B).<p>Then &quot;Recruit&quot; bought Simplyhired (2016).<p>Then &quot;Recruit&quot; bought Glassdoor in 2018 (for another $1.2B). Glassdoor worked as a job aggregator as well.<p>So now largest job aggregator companies convert from &quot;job aggregator&quot; model to &quot;job board&quot; model where customers are direct employers and not other job boards.<p>So few years ago I started to transform my job board business into job aggregator again. I think if I never abandoned job aggregator idea in the first place, my business, probably, would be a little bit more successful by now. However it is hard to tell for sure. I could have given up competing against Indeed and SimplyHired back in 2007-2012.

When we started CircleCI, there were at least 3 other things that were pretty much the same. In addition, two similar services had died, and one had pivoted to be a PaaS. There was also Jenkins, TeamCity, Bamboo, and lots of other alternatives. And then over the next two years, there was at least 20 competitors that started, some with significant funding.<p>I agonized over so many competitors, and none of them mattered. If you&#x27;re going to do it, just do it.

I&#x27;ve been building Jive Search. There&#x27;s already tons of competitors in search (Google, Bing, etc.). There&#x27;s also DuckDuckGo, StartPage, etc. that claim to be privacy-focused but are just as opaque as Google. The niche I&#x27;m targeting is users that understand that for true privacy in search you have to be transparent and open source so that users can view the code and run it on their own if they want.

I had, or I guess still have, an idea for Yet Another Web Framework. I&#x27;ve written four versions of it in three languages already. I kept running into a problem: if it was complex enough to realize my full vision, then I wouldn&#x27;t have time to maintain it, <i>especially</i> if it got any traction at all. Plus, for each single thing I wanted it to do, there were pretty well established things you could use instead.<p>I enjoyed programming it as a learning experience and to scratch my own itch. But I eventually decided it would actually be harder to maintain the system than to write a dumb little web app for any given project. And that there were probably much more valuable things I could teach myself than My Excentric Web Framework.<p>On another front, while I have never written any code for it, I keep thinking it would be cool to have GeoCities back but updated for all the cool stupid things you can do in the modern Web. A place for your weird taste in CSS, in public, with no shame and open to all. But I keep wishing somebody else would do it, which is not exactly the thing you asked about but somewhat close.

It&#x27;s pretty hard nowadays to come up with a brilliant unique idea that has never been implemented before. I&#x27;m not even sure it&#x27;s possible at all. Competition means there&#x27;s a market and customers willing to pay for a product. This is a validation of your idea.<p>Now, unless you&#x27;re shooting for the unicorn status, there&#x27;s a pretty good chance you can build a good product, compete and get enough customers to make a living. You don&#x27;t have to be the best or the cheapest to compete and you don&#x27;t need hundreds of thousands of customers to make a living.<p>In the end, i think it really depends on what you&#x27;re trying to achieve: unicorn status or small side project that you&#x27;ll enjoy working on and might someday become a full time job.<p>Either way you should try to do what you love, or if that&#x27;s not an option, to learn to love what you do. That way, even if you don&#x27;t succeed, your time won&#x27;t be wasted and will be spent doing something you love.

It depends whether you&#x27;re building something for the utility of it or to make money.<p>You can do the latter in a crowded market as you said, but often if you think you would like to build something for yourself, which is often the best way to build a product, then it&#x27;s certainly possible to be satisfied with something that already exists.

I was told early in my career that you can&#x27;t sell something unless you have competitors. it&#x27;s not universally true I expect but many potential customers operate from the mindset that a) if you have no competitors, it&#x27;s not a real thing and b) there&#x27;s no hurry for them to look into it.

I gave up trying to invent something unique (because trying too hard tells you that you are failing), but I constantly contemplate on ideas to make something that already exists better. There are many things that are already great, but some weird or restrictive design decisions are making it impossible for me to accept their &#x27;greatness&#x27;. Take the G5 Power Mac, for instance. At the time it really was one of the greatest products Apple ever conceived. But then came some weird design decisions, partly due to IBM&#x27;s inability to provide more efficient chip designs and it all went to hell. Coolant leakage, overheating, insane power consumption. Since then I&#x27;ve been trying to come up with ideas to make the Power Mac design a thing again, but with another system inside.

I think your idea is fantastic. That doesn’t exist for me today; even if there is another solution out there, it hasn’t come to my attention, consideration, or adoption.<p>I think the idea of a reverse address book could be generalized across many contexts. Tim Bernes-Lee is laying tracks for a protocol with that in mind, but it needs apps, especially ones that reach into where people store data today and migrate it to a network where people can subscribe to others data and publish their own.<p>Meet me where I’m at: on an iPhone, with its contacts system and cloud. Give me shared data without making me relearn contact management over again. Make it so I can show my mom how to do it in a minute, or better yet so easy she doesn’t need to ask about it. Don’t wait for big tech to deliver this. Prove it’s possible.

I had an idea, that I was going to implement over the month of May as soon as I finished my internship. I was very excited, I wrote up a pitch and mapped out the infrastructure. I just hadn&#x27;t written code yet, I was saving that for when I could just write code for myself in May. This weekend someone else launched it. It&#x27;s not as if I was thinking that my idea was novel, I just didn&#x27;t think anyone else would get onto it let alone &#x27;beat&#x27; me to market. I can still work on that idea for sure, but it really took the wind out of my sails.<p>Here&#x27;s Overcast with Clip Sharing[0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marco.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;27&#x2F;overcast-clip-sharing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marco.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;27&#x2F;overcast-clip-sharing</a>

I am in the same boat as you are in.I Have so many ideas but not sure which one to follow. I found steve blank&#x27;s &quot;The startup owner&#x27;s manual&quot; very useful in evaluating ideas. I have created this excel(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;spreadsheets&#x2F;d&#x2F;1Cap3CIWHJq3WdAypU6l3y_02e5L0xi8tubMYC5cpS04&#x2F;edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;spreadsheets&#x2F;d&#x2F;1Cap3CIWHJq3WdAypU6l3...</a>) using the website <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guidearama.com&#x2F;guides&#x2F;fwb.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guidearama.com&#x2F;guides&#x2F;fwb.html</a>

1. Your idea is probably not identical. You execution almost certainly won&#x27;t be. 2. There is usually room to compete. 3. Innovations often take root slowly and need a network of collaborators and competitors to nurture them.

I think one of the question to ask yourself is: is that competing product the one I&#x27;d have built? Is it a product that would solve the problem I wanted to solve perfectly? Is that product awesome?<p>If the answer&#x27;s yes, you probably should stop. Because at best, you&#x27;d make the same product. If not, see where the product fails and try and estimate what could be better and is it worth it.<p>Last, remember that the later you are on the market, the more expensive it gets to get attention. You&#x27;ll either need cash or need to seek funding.

If there are no competitors I generally worry far more than if it exists. I have built many things that do not exist and found out why they do not exist; there is no (sustainable) market (even though we did some research which showed enough market, but turned out there was not or at least not enough to reach that market with limited&#x2F;bootstrapped means). I have also built many products into (we then thought) saturated markets (dating, free hosting, ...) which did well for us.

I try to ask myself, if I execute this idea really well vs. really badly, what is the full range of possible outcomes? If the range isn’t that big then the problem doesn’t really matter. This has saved me from building a lot of cool, neat stuff that isn’t important.<p>I think my current idea (a new IDE) has potential to be very important, and I think I’m going to do 2 or 3 key things better than my competitors, so I just have to do it :) It doesn’t matter who else is doing it.

The longer you are in the industry, the more you realize that things repeat and the only thing that matters is getting some market share and growing your business. This can happen in a number of ways - perhaps a beautiful UI, network effects, lower costs, or a new technology platform (web) that shakes up existing markets. So it happens all the time, you just need to find the right angle to best the incumbents.

This is a funny question because most successful open source software seems to be a clone of existing software. E.g. gimp&#x2F;Photoshop, inkscape&#x2F;Illustrator and libre office&#x2F;office. Of course the nice part is that as an OSS developer, you don&#x27;t have to think about the requirements and specification and even the UI of the software because that has already been done.

My favorite example of this is jet.com - who in their right mind would compete directly with Amazon on Amazon’s home turf? Well, it turns out it only looked like the same turf (“e-commerce”), but that’s the catch. Differentiation is subtle yet powerful, and Jet.com went for slower, bulk commodities, with a different pricing approach. Markets are, apparently, full of fickle niches!

I only build things I actually want to use myself. If I, after research, find that my idea has already been done it simply means that there&#x27;s an untapped market where either their product sucks or they&#x27;re bad at marketing. Otherwise I would have already have known about them and I shouldn&#x27;t need to do research to find it.

The saying:<p>“Pioneers get arrows. Settlers take the land.”<p>Basically represents that being first to market is not ideal. Out execute when the market is proven.

&gt; For you builders&#x2F;founders out there, are you on a never ending quest to find something new&#x2F;unique or do you prefer another quality in your idea to start a project?<p>I take on projects (both commercial and hobby) that satisfy a need that isn&#x27;t already being adequately addressed elsewhere.<p>I don&#x27;t care much if a product of the same sort already exists. I only care that it isn&#x27;t adequately meeting a need.<p>In fact, if I&#x27;ve come up with an idea and find that nothing like it already exists, I consider that a red flag. Not a showstopper, but a reason to be much more cautious. This is because it often happens that if nobody else is addressing a given market, it&#x27;s because there&#x27;s some serious problem in addressing that market that I haven&#x27;t foreseen (perhaps it isn&#x27;t as big as I think, or there is some technical gotcha that I didn&#x27;t notice, etc.)

&quot;Being first to do something is unimportant. Being best is what counts.&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;3&#x2F;13&#x2F;8202873&#x2F;first-doesnt-matter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;3&#x2F;13&#x2F;8202873&#x2F;first-doesnt-matt...</a>)

Not necessarily.<p>Overall: Look at all these products that have nearly identical features (with only some distinction).<p>The key is to think about the features that would make your product unique and to analyze whether there is people who will prefer your product (at your price point) to all the other options.<p>I&#x27;d love to bring something innovative to the market but it really isn&#x27;t necessary. A lot of people focus on things that a lot of other people don&#x27;t care about or like. So it&#x27;s easy to get a decent market share with basically already existing products that just provide some &quot;buy-worthy&quot; features.<p>Of course competition can be harder here but on the other hand you don&#x27;t have to put that much effort into building something completely new (which will give others the opportunity to improve upon your great idea).<p>It&#x27;s also easier to analyze an already existing market.

A musician doesn&#x27;t stop writing a love song just because there are millions of love songs already written.

I think a lot of people are missing the point about what actually makes a startup work in the early stages: a reliable and affordable route to customers. If you have this then go for it. If you don’t, then your real first step is to find this. Without this you won’t be able to compete.

I know a VCS service and a support tool that could let you steal their lunch. Both are lumbering giants under their current owners and have not innovated for years. If its lean they could beat you on execution. If its riddled with bloat and the good engineers have left, you could win.

The heuristic for this is can you make the product 10x better (along a dimension that matters) for some subset of consumers? The subset can be equal to the set: Zoom makes video conferencing 10x better on reliability for the whole market. That said, that case is much rarer. It is often much easier to deeply understand the needs of a subset of users and make a tailored solution that delivers a 10x outcome to that set of users. Examples here are CRMs that specialize on industry verticals vs Salesforce. A pharmaceutical CRM is functionally very different than a one size fits all CRM. PS Also, stop looking for big markets. Look for a small market that you can dominate quickly and logically extend from there. PPS Most ideas here stolen from Thiel

No, except in certain cases.<p>When the market is large you can almost always carve out a stake. You already know the demand is there, you can get a share of it by reaching people who haven&#x27;t heard of or don&#x27;t like your competitor, or by doing something a little different and better. The risk and reward are both lower in these businesses vs a Valley style moonshot that VCs tend to like.<p>However if the market is just a few companies or the service depends heavily on network effects I wouldn&#x27;t do it. E.g. the investment required to offer as many apps as Google Play or as many social updates as Facebook is huge, you can&#x27;t really bootstrap your way into this, and people are only going to engage with so many app stores or social networks.

I think it will help if you know why what you&#x27;re going to build is going to be better than what exists. Like Google knew its search will be better, like Zoom knows its conf is better than WebEx.<p>Apple is the quintessential example of &quot;take a sad song, and make it better&quot;.

There is a difference bt. building an app&#x2F;software and building a business. If you enter a field with existing businesses, you have to treat it like a business, otherwise your app will generate zero revenue. Talking unfortunately from experience.

16 years ago I created a database for video game mods and led the market. Now I’m in the opposite position where services like Steam’s Workshop have taken over. Despite that my conviction that mods are critically important has never waivered, and alternatives &#x2F; competition is required. So now I’m the upstart and it feels good to be building something I’m passionate about and believe in, despite the 200 ton gorilla in the room. We both serve slightly different roles, developers using our tech love what we are creating and I’m confident we can carve out a worthwhile piece of the pie.<p>Long story short I’m glad this is a rule I broke and didn’t let my inspiration evaporate.

Copying ideas is highly underrated.<p>Competition is a fantastic signal of an existing market where customers are likely used to paying. I think the fear of replicating an existing idea is usually overblown while in reality every founder&#x2F;entrepreneur ends up giving the solution his&#x2F;her own unique touch. Even if you&#x27;re blindly copying an existing product, you cannot help but add your past experience and your taste for products in it.<p>I elaborated more on this in my essay: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invertedpassion.com&#x2F;copying-ideas-is-highly-underrated&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invertedpassion.com&#x2F;copying-ideas-is-highly-underrat...</a>

I think it makes a difference whether you&#x27;re looking for ideas that will do well, vs just having an idea that you would go for as a pet project. I have one of those &quot;just a pet project&quot; ideas which I have been developing for no reason other than my own benefit, and let me tell you, I <i>love</i> finding competition. It&#x27;s like Christmas every time I find out there&#x27;s a service that incorporates some of the concepts, and I keep a big document of inspiration that draws between all of them.<p>If your idea isn&#x27;t unique, you can still succeed, but you have to out-do the competition on something other than uniqueness.

I realized a few years ago: You don&#x27;t have to be the best. You just have to be better than some. You can always cannibalize the market share of the current worst performers. You get your start there, and build up as you can.

For sure. I have concepts written down for things like a social network where the user retains ownership of their data and advertisers can offer them money for access to it. There are partial concepts out there like this but the biggest issue preventing me from creating a prototype is simply that I don&#x27;t think I have the time to nurture a social network into being (which is probably harder than creating the thing). You need people on it to gain other people, a real chick and egg problem.<p>I still want to build the prototype. But, in trying to be realistic, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;ll become a business or even popular.

Have you thought of &#x27;joining&#x27; the competition?<p>We were somehow conditioned to believe that we either have to be the Founder or nothing. We are not losers if we are employees and not employers.<p>We don&#x27;t have to be the CEO to pursue an idea we are passionate about.<p>And if it is impact that you want; think that most often, the impact you can have joining an existing successful company will be waay bigger than reinventing the wheel and building your own.<p>I do respect the nobility of wanting to be your own boss and doing your own awesome thing but in general(not giving advice for this specific case), that&#x27;s not the only way..

Clayton Christensen publishes “The Innovator’s Dilemma” in 1997.[1] No incumbent is safe. It can be easier to be first to market, but being first doesn’t mean permanent victory. If you believe your solution solves a problem people have then it’s a fine choice to keep going.<p>Also, you’re going to need alignment between your funding, the skills of your team, and your proposed solution.<p>[1]: The Innovator’s Dilemma, Wikipedia, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma</a>

Not so much about something already existing, but knowing how next-to-impossible it&#x27;ll be to compete against the Googles&#x2F;Microsofts of the world once the idea starts to take up steam&#x2F;get noticed.

Sometime its just a single feature that makes a difference. There are tons of news aggregators out there but I decided to build my own anyways, because it updates the website automatically without that I have to scroll. After I build it I realized that I use it as a &quot;second-screen website&quot; where the news just runs over the site like a ticker. I don&#x27;t have a lot of visitors, but the ones that come stay for a long time, that is great! <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uptopnews.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uptopnews.com&#x2F;</a>

I usually loose inspiration when I&#x27;ve thought the idea through and concluded whether it could be done, and whether it could be successful. If I know how to build it, that&#x27;s generally enough. Like The FinalKey, yes, I&#x27;m using it every day, and I&#x27;m very happy with it, and many of those I&#x27;ve given one are very happy with it, and can&#x27;t understand that I didn&#x27;t pursue it further.. Well, it was done! and now there is FIDO and Mooltipass, so it&#x27;s not needed anymore anyway, so I get to move on to something else.

In my opinion...<p>It&#x27;s quite established how to answer this question. More specifically, it&#x27;s a classic strategy question (with a lot of marketing in it). You should look up what broad theory is applicable. My take (have an MBA or equivalent) is to look at differentiation, segmentation, resource based strategy, feedback loops and platform theory, Porter&#x27;s five forces with critique, a static VS a dynamic perspective.<p>If you can find a viable (hopefully quite sustainable) strategy, go for it. If you can&#x27;t, then don&#x27;t.

My inspiration for creating things may often not be &quot;let&#x27;s make X exist&quot;, but rather &quot;like X, but good&quot;. I make PWAs and APIs, so unfortunately making a better Civilization V or a slack that performs like AIM isn&#x27;t going to fit in my schedule.<p>What puts me off is usually the lack of a usable API. Or, if closed source app X has a gorilla that&#x27;s holding the banana wrong, I might have to recreate the entire jungle from scratch just to get some basic architectural or UX flow fixed.

I actually started on a project recently <i>because</i> a competing product already exists.<p>I really dislike Emby and Plex server (I don&#x27;t want to besmirch them here but you can email me if you want a rant :) ), and as a result I&#x27;ve been working on&#x2F;off on a product to replace them.<p>I probably won&#x27;t monetize it any time soon, but it&#x27;s not off the table honestly, since I personally feel that my system will be better. Even if it&#x27;s not, I had a lot of fun making it.

If you haven’t heard of them without doing competitive research, but you are in the target market, then you can at least beat them at getting the word out.

No. And I think that creating something entirely new is overrated sometimes: one might argue that it&#x27;s a requirement for a startup to achieve skyrocketing growth rates. But it&#x27;s pretty feasible to build a healthy business creating a new version of something, specially on fields where customer relationship and after-sales services play an important role. That&#x27;s been my experience at least.

I&#x27;ve developed a few ideas that I would love to work on, but I&#x27;m extremely pessimistic about business ventures. If anything remotely similar to my idea exists, I assume that they&#x27;ve considered my idea and there&#x27;s something I&#x27;m missing. Like there&#x27;s some reason it wouldn&#x27;t work the way I&#x27;m imagining, and I&#x27;d fail.<p>So yeah, I tend to quit unless the idea is super unique.

Everything exists by now. Every single idea that you might have has been tried already. Your next startup is not going to be the first doing what it does.<p>Believe me: it’s not the idea that makes a great project &#x2F; company. It’s the execution. It’s the market fit. It’s providing the best solution possible. It’s delighting your customers. It’s giving them real value for their money.

honestly, I don&#x27;t mind something similar already exists.<p>the problem I&#x27;m having is how do I enter a niche space and get customers away from my competition?<p>the niche I&#x27;m entering has existing solutions, but they&#x27;re messy and difficult to use (based on early feedback). I want to simplify a lot of it, but I know in the beginning I&#x27;m going to lack a lot of features that current existing solutions have.<p>If I keep at it, I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;ll get to them eventually, but I think the lack of some of these features could be a major deal breaker for some potential customers early on. I don&#x27;t want to cater to just larger customers, but I don&#x27;t want to ignore them either.<p>I&#x27;m just not sure what the right balance is going to be, but I think the only way I&#x27;m going to figure it out is by engaging with potential customers for their input, while also not pushing them to jump over unless they think we&#x27;re ready.

Some great advice here. To add another perspective: sometimes you don&#x27;t know where your idea will take you. A lot of your competition is locked into their path. Being at the outset of yours, the customers you listen to along the way may steer you in a different direction or pivot into a far better idea.

I have similar feeling when I do my research and see my ideas all over Google search results.<p>My strategy now becomes how do I _disrupt_ the incumbent. I take inspiration from Apple entering mp3 market, Uber entering the taxi market or Google entering the search market. Have not yet achieve success but will continue to try.

It doesn&#x27;t put me off, but makes me more cautious. I need to put more effort and focus on what makes my product different to the competition.<p>That clarity can really help push your product forward in a crowded market. I also feel that doing 1 thing and doing it well or better at launch can really help.

I&#x27;m not put off at all - though I guess it depends on your goal? I want to play with a couple of new languages. To do so, I&#x27;m taking a problem that&#x27;s already solved today (not in a way I love) and writing yet another entrant. My goal is learning, not profit.

There is no competition, only execution. Dropbox had been done before. I remember something called X drive like a decade prior but it was no Dropbox. And still no one does what they do. Google drive has yet to have a desktop client that does anything like it.

Zoom is not a typical example. In this case the founder already knew the space and product really well. Eric Yuan was VP for webex at Cisco and hence already knew the market, had the contacts, and understood what was holding webex back as a product.

Usually it is the question of age. If it is just a few years, you might have a chance. If it&#x27;s more than 20, you&#x27;re probably either wrong about the potential or it&#x27;s a really tough market requiring huge investment or paradigm change.

When I started thinking about home security - Comcast &amp; companies like Arlo came existence. But, they are not good enough from customer standpoint. Lots of opportunities still exist for disruption - when we think from end customer standpoint.

Can you link to the existing implementation? Is it keybase ?<p>Work on it anyway, if you can’t beat them, maybe you can join them one day. Even if you are second best, you will get free marketing from the #1, when potential customers do their due diligence.

Depends on how your product will compete, but being first entrant isn&#x27;t always good. Apple copied their PC from IBM, their tablet from Microsoft, and their ipod from others. They&#x27;re successful because they do it better. Can you?

Just out of curiosity, is anybody here looking to create a new consumer operating system to compete with Windows and Mac? I&#x27;d like to, but I have no idea where to start. Talk about putting it off because something already exists! :)

Yes! But ironically I&#x27;m also put off by things not being done.<p>Currently working on a (side project) small service where I know at least one place needs it. It&#x27;s small enough in scope that I don&#x27;t mind following it through to completion.

I always tell people there is no point in worrying about whether or not someone has already started building your idea first, what you should worry about is the person who will come after you with your same idea, but better.

Not really; even if it already exist it may be different from what I want in various ways, so, I can make up a new one. (In the case of FOSS, sometimes it is suitable to modify an existing one, although also sometimes not.)

It all depends on how it&#x27;s being done.<p>As they say, no idea is original. If you have one that is, go for it. Otherwise take a preexisting idea and make it yours. Do it in a way that&#x27;s never been done before.

If you&#x27;re just building an exact clone of something and not innovating, then no.<p>If you see something and think it could be done much better, then you&#x27;re not building the same thing. Go for it!

I work for a small company that is always trying out new projects. Most of them are ideas that already exist out there, but we feel the current solutions are lacking in some major way.

Does looking it up afterwards help or not?<p>Imo, its better if you start working on it, propose your solution and then see what exists. This might just help you think and ideate in an unbiased way

What is the name of the existing service? I am interested in trying it out :) I also once had the idea of a reverse address book but didn&#x27;t think many people would use it.

Build it anyways. Who cares if there&#x27;s competition. The point is, would you be better if you did build it?<p>99% of the time, it would be a yes. Even if it didn&#x27;t pass market.

Who was the existing provider cause I could use that.

Usually only an alternative exists, not exactly what I do. FWIW I steal ideas from other people for my projects.

Absolutely not. Only if the thing exists already satisfies all my needs and I could not build a better version.

This is quite a nuanced subject. It&#x27;s something I&#x27;ve had a chance to think long and hard about and discuss with many founders.<p>I wrote a lesson about it in the Nugget Startup Academy but it&#x27;s behind a paywall. Here&#x27;s a screen shot of that lesson. Apologies about the format and hope it helps your thinking on the subject:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropbox.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;3ufpfrcarg7v5f3&#x2F;competition.png?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropbox.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;3ufpfrcarg7v5f3&#x2F;competition.png?dl...</a>

Who beat you to the reverse address book? I haven&#x27;t seen a de facto option for this

By the way, if your idea is Facebook you&#x27;re 20 years too late.<p>(Facebook is a reverse address book.)

The trick is what you are building can not exist, something similar can, but not _it_.

never.<p>i like how bill nguyen, founder of the color app, used to say, and i paraphrase, but he never cares about what other people have made, just focus on creating the best experience or something to that effect.

Well, Zoom had probably tons of funding.

Myspace existed before Facebook

Quite a few things.

Consider that 99% of new products are evolutionary, they don&#x27;t represent a fundamental new approach or a fundamental new innovation. Most real innovation is incremental, and small, and new &#x27;great products&#x27; are a compendium of a lot of little things.

I have put off an idea because it’s not technologically feasible yet. However, that’s given me years of tinkering with the same idea in my mind, therapeutic to some extent.

Nope! I found a success story on HN and now I&#x27;m stealing their idea and making it better, because I see a barely tapped market that deserves a better product.

&gt; Zoom is a recent and great example of competing in a crowded market and winning.<p>If you read Zoom&#x27;s S1 filing, you will find they were profitable because they have their R&amp;D in China.

First question: are you rich? Because you&#x27;re going to have to buy market share.