Here's an idea: find someone else with a problem and work on that. This works especially well if the someone else is in business, very busy, and has some money. Chances are better that your solution to their problem won't have much competition: if it did, they would have already gone with it.
I know this is the opposite of "scratch your own itch", but I always found that advice overrated. I have always been much more successful scratching other people's itches.
1000x this. The Internet doesn't mean every idea you have will be built by 10 other people first; it means that every idea you have that serves 20-something geeks will be built by 10 other people first. Build for other people. Added bonus: other people tend to actually spend money for solutions to their problems.
It's not at all hard to know what ladies want. Start by talking to ladies. The Internet improves your nerdy guy private life in a variety of ways. Distill them to crisp examples. Seek isomorphisms in your conversations with women. You buy hobby item X, they may buy hobby item Y. Or, maybe they buy X too, but are too put off by the culture of the sites/apps that help you with X. You have job N. They have job K. You rarely think about K because you're an N and a guy. And so on.
Teaching. Fabric and crafts. Child care (holy is there ever a billion dollars waiting for whoever cracks the code on babysitters). PR work. Marketing/communications. Office managers. Metalworking. Literary fiction. I'm sure you can find something.
I don't want to be a negative nancy, but every idea I can think of along those lines with an obvious profit angle actually has been built by 10 people first. For example, babysitters — there are tons of sites in that space. Just Google "find a babysitter" and you'll get a full page of sites dedicated to just that.
I think one thing most women want is something emotionally gratifying. (I believe this is why rock stars get laid so much: Their songs meet some of those emotional needs in women that lots of men are so bad at meeting.) I think that is part of what typical "girly" loves like kids, pet cats, and "pretty" things have in common: They serve emotional needs rather than practical needs. If you can figure something out that serves an emotional need and a practical need for women, that's probably billionaire territory.
You know the saying: Men give love to get sex, women give sex to get love. If you can find a way to sell lurv, you will be in very tall cotton.
(Please note that I am female and not "talking trash" about women at all. Thank you.)
I think this has largely to do with the acquisition of Heroku and the notion of “you can mine for gold or you can sell pickaxes.” [1] It seems to me there is a gold rush for the pickaxes now.
I think that approach would work better for a startup company, but for a side project, it doesn't seem that feasible.
It is good advice, but when I want something to hack on in the evening or on the weekends, setting up a business meeting isn't exactly crossing my mind.
I work on other peoples problems at the day job so it's nice to have a break :)
I think this is only a problem if you're targeting niches because as I see it, if you can't use your own product while pretending to be your non-technical mother, then you shouldn't be in business unless you're selling for a premium. Unfortunately, technical geeks won't pay a premium and they themselves can often build something relatively useful with, in this case, even a simple google search:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
I actually went through this exercise before and found it to be annoying, but how often do you search for and buy books? It's not everyday you do.
Don't get me wrong, I've bookmarked your site and find it useful, but I probably won't go back to it in a while.
I've created successful products (pretty close to commodity products, in fact) before where I tried to evaluate direct competitors, and found over 50 of them before stopping counting.
Here's what emboldens me when learning about competitors: When you initially had this idea, you weren't aware that all of these competitors existed. Which means that some segment of the market, including potential customers who are * similar to you* also don't know about all of the competitors. To them, the other people with the same idea might as well not exist.
"A few hours (and a pity party) later, I realized that this isn’t the end of the world. The concept has been validated"
This is an important realisation. Just because there is someone else already doing something isn't a reason not to do it. It seems like this affliction is curious to software, and possibly more pronounced in web based software.
In his post entitled "Making Ideas Work"[1], Chris Savage (CEO of Wistia) relates his experiences prior to starting Wistia:
"There are tons of viable startup ideas that get stopped before they get a chance to start. These ideas get left un-executed for a multitude of reasons including fear, money, and time. But, the most common roadblock I see is overestimation of the competition. The process goes like this: come up with an idea, google to see if it’s been done, find someone doing something similar, and give up.
As it turns out, this is the exact process we went through when trying to start Wistia. We’d think we were onto something exciting because our idea was so unique, then we’d find a company doing something similar and we’d give up on that particular approach. We continued this vicious cycle for 4 months until we realized that absolutely no one else had heard of the ‘competition’ we’d found. It turns out that it’s actually really, really hard to get people to pay attention or use anything. After this epiphany it was easy to forge ahead."
Now I'm not saying your book side-project is, like, your startup idea or anything but obviously you've fallen victim to a very, very common thing in our industry and that's to drastically over-estimate the value in being a first mover.
If something already exists, don't be afraid to compete! The "market" out there is unimaginably huge and people just wander round trying out all sorts of things. Not only that but it's constantly growing, not only due to population growth but the growth of the internet itself. There's room for everyone to get in there and have a slice of the pie.
"... the most common roadblock I see is overestimation of the competition ..."
Such a profound observation of why competition is important. There is a problem with competing in exactly the same space though. The pie slice I'm not so sure about. There is a strong correlation between Internet sites, and users which gives you an upper-bound on returns: Adermic, Huberman, "Zipf’s law and the Internet" ~ http://www.scribd.com/doc/3254689/Zipfs-law-and-the-Internet
A year and a half ago I was working on a python realtime push server I'd serendipitously code named Cyclone. It was an alternative to having to use twisted or Orbited and I was super excited about it.
I got drunk that night and whined a whole bunch feeling that my work was wasted, but the next day I dug into their code and was really excited. It was a much better implementation saving me a ton of time and I've been happy using it ever since.
When I spent more time writing songs, I would go through a similar emotional and mental strain but in smaller iterations. There would be periods in which no matter what chord progression or melody I came up with, it always seemed to sound like a song that someone else had already written. When this happened I would discard the song in frustration, even if it had great potential.
In time I figured out that some of my favorite songs had the same chord progressions, structure and melody as each other but they still did not sound the same. Why not?
Every artist has a vision and a song written by someone else should have no impact on that vision. My problem was that I was too worried on being original instead of being focused on having a vision.
Just as music has been passed from generation to generation so are ideas. Many ideas seem to owe to some other idea. Don't worry about being the first. Worry about being the best.
I used to think like him in the past. But these days I am already so occupied with executing on things at my job and in my free time that I thank the high heavens every time I realize someone else has executed on "my" idea.
Every time this happens, someone else solved a problem for me for a fraction of the cost that would it take me to implement. I can just pick another thing from my ideas.txt file and work on that.
This happened quite a lot recently because I want to break into Android development with a friend of mine. The first three ideas we came up with have already been done. It turned out that one of the ideas is an amazingly popular apps in the Android store already. Too bad it was not us who did it. But then, now we have finally found an Android app idea nobody has executed on yet and we will start working on it today.
Hey Matt! I'm the guy behind HackerBooks - I certainly can relate, because I felt the same way more than once (for hackerbooks, earlier on for learnivore, and for other sites as well).
But here's the trick: there's really room for more than one app on each topic.
Take the "time tracking" topic for instance: search how many profitable business work around that topic. You'll be amazed!
I can only encourage you to release your app, which I will definitely use!
Has the idea been "validated" just because it made the first page of Hacker News?
Anyway, I write apps for Android, and I actually entered a really crowded space because I thought I could do better, and now I have the #1 app in my genre.
It's a big world. There are lots of people. And I don't see any reason why there can't be room for 2 similar products, as long as they are both great.
I considered it validated because HN is the ideal target market and there was a lot of interest in the comments, not just because it was on the front page.
"... The sting is even worse when you have invested time and resources already. The idea may be “worthless”, but it sure doesn’t seem that way when its YOUR idea. ..."
And you give up so easy?
First understand why determination is important ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html There are also multiple suggestions on how to generate ideas worth working on found in these articles:
Another obvious lesson to take from this is that it is sometimes better to release something imperfect and improve upon it, rather than wait for the perfect product, because by then you may be irrelevant.
The downside to this is lack of agility due to trying to maintain backwards compatibility, and being bogged down by support.
That's very true. A project I'm working on at the moment has some of the worst code I've seen. Copy and paste crap everywhere. No understanding of good programming practices or web design. A mountain of technical debt.
Yet, the company is doing well, making money, hiring people and expanding quickly.
Had they waited until their skills were good enough, or spent a fortune on experienced developers, they would not be where they are today - with a heap of technical issues sure, but also with the money to throw at these issues.
That's a difficult question. To solve it I "crowd sourced it", i.e. I have a UserVoice feedback buttons with 2 ideas: 1/Stay in Alpha 2/Go Beta. So far... I need to stay in Alpha... :(
At the risk of sounding presumptuous, since I have another one of the sites you mention, I think I need to say a couple of things.
It's a mistake to view all these book sites as somehow enemies of each other. The simple fact is, at 7% commission and an audience of 100K or so, you aren't going to be buying yachts off the Mediterranean coast any time soon. hn-books was a hobby site for me. I used it to test out a few different ideas I had about how to deploy internet apps. The only reason you keep seeing posts from hn-books is because I had a bet with JacquesM about how viable the site would be. I thought it was nothing more than a lark, while Jacques thought it had a lot of potential. So I thought doing a dozen book reviews or so would at least show traction or not. So far I'm winning the bet.
The second thing is that execution beats everything else. I spent 2 weeks on hn-books and I was done with it. No more coding, no more anything. I don't sit around and obsess over it, I don't plan all kinds of new features, and I don't worry about how it's traffic compares to others. The only thing I worry about hn-books is that it gets enough votes when I post a review to come off the "no-follow" list. And that's simply because the bet with Jacques wouldn't be fair if it didn't. A lot of you guys have spent ten times as much time as I spent on hn-books and still don't have anything to show for it. Maybe a little less thinking and a little more execution? We have a couple dozen guys with site ideas and only a few deployed? Surely we can do better than that.
So if you want to do books, have fun with it! Try some new stuff out. Do something you've never done before. But whatever you do, don't sit around planning or dreaming up how it might be great or horrible or how your competitors might do this or that. All of that is just a waste of time. Execute. Then decide if you want to keep working on your site or move on to something else.
Yes, you can do some Chinese Math and convince yourself that there is a fortune in tech books and somehow we're all in some cutthroat competition. But do yourself a favor: don't do that. You can execute perfectly and still fail completely. So worrying won't get you anywhere. In the end, a site like you want has to be for yourself first, the community second. If you start thinking outside of that, you're probably wasting energy.
Also, I would be careful about taking every comment over in that thread as some kind of to-do list. There's a difference between asking a bunch of folks to comment randomly on some neat site and figuring out exactly what you need to do to accomplish some goal. Sometimes you just have to say no.
BTW, I posted a link to hackerbooks on my blog. I'm happy to post a link to your site as well when it comes up. Just let me know. I refuse to make this competitive. This should be something that helps everybody out. I'm hoping to learn some stuff from you guys! I'm excited about all the ideas out there.
Recently I've thought that after I do the first dozen or so books, I might continue on for a while. But not because of any great business plan: I just like reading great books and reviewing great tools and talking about how cool they are. I know some people think that's pumping the tools or books, but I like 'em, they've helped me, and I'm going to explain why I like 'em. Screw everybody else. I think you have to work from inside out on this stuff. (Quite frankly, my advice to you is if you want to execute on something to make a few dollars, find something besides books. For some reason, everybody and their brother are into books nowadays. Edw is right: if you want to make money, find somebody with money who is in pain and help them, don't concentrate on scratching your own itch so much.)
Hi Daniel, I did not intend to make into a 'battle'. The site is just a hobby for me as well, I have no delusions about getting bought out by Amazon or spinning this into a huge thing. My goal, in fact, was to make enough money each month that I could buy a new book :)
The enemies reference fit in nicely with Getting Real -- which I recently finished reading and was what pushed me to build the site -- but I hope that it didn't come off as being overly aggressive/hostile.
Thank you for the advice, I will take it to heart.
tptacek hit the nail on the head: find something somewhere else.
hn-books is extremely powerful: as a laboratory to tell me how to do other sites. As a book site it isn't hitting on so much (as much as I am growing to like it) If you were to find another market where there aren't 40 thousand guys writing code? Something like that might have a LOT more traction. (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)
Sorry. It's a startup term, and has nothing to do with Chinese people. It's not meant as pejorative.
The idea is that you look at some market -- say in this case the people in China -- and say something like "Gosh! If we could only get 1% of that market, we'd all be rich!"
Of course, it's downright impossible to get ten people to buy your product, because it sucks, but because you are multiplying these huge market numbers by tiny percentages and still getting big numbers, you think you have a good idea.
Startups have a tendency to do this with anything, but for a while the favorite example was China: "If we could only get 1% of the Chinese to buy our hotdog painting machine at ten bucks a pop, we'll all be millionaires!" etc, etc.
This is exactly how I feel over the past couple of years, and each time I convinced myself that it's better to have competitors.. because it makes sense, right? (potential users, their needs, etc.)
But somehow this feeling that other people also came up with that cool idea ("my idea", "the idea") took all my passion about the project away.
My biggest disappointment was when I see flavours.me while I was coding exactly the same. I was thinking to make the website involved with information retrieval/recommendation though, but the interface was going to be exactly the same. At that time, I even started a master's program with an emphasis on machine learning in order to code this project better and my thesis advisor was an author of one of the machine learning books that's being recommended at hackerbooks.com and probably one of the best academic I can study on machine learning). Everything was going perfect --until a friend of mine told me about flavours.me... and all my passion just went away because I was exactly looking at the project that I was gonna implement -even the backend was going to be much more different.
But then, when about.me got acquired by AOL, I disappointed much more because they did the same project with flavours.me and they got successful.. Now, I can realize that it's not about the unique idea. It's about to fill tiny gaps, and keep trying until you bet your competitors. And a couple of months ago, I started my project again and I think it's gonna be awesome.
But still, I think it discourages to see an implemented copy of your idea before getting started to work on it. Maybe it's better to come up with a quick (but not that dirty) implementation of the project, and then looking for competitors (and hopefully, to see you are doing better) and then improving your idea.
I love it when I have an idea and find out that someone else already did it - it lets me cross it off my list! I produce FAR more ideas than I can execute, and it makes me feel bad to let them fester. I would love to find people who need help with the ideas and can do much of the execution (and in fact I work this way with some people, to good effect.)
It's almost a naive thing to say and I probably wouldn't ever do it myself either (and perfectly understand everyone's reasons not to) but somehow it's awkward that no one said "come on guys, join forces".
No criticism towards the respective project owners either, don't get me wrong. And like other comments pointed out, there's definitely room for more than one solution.
Go work in industry: you'll find plenty of products or pieces of infrastructure that have been developed solely because a) there was no money for the best solution, b) best solution was open source and we can't use it (think finance, insurance, etc.) or c) someone thought they could do a better job.
But I agree, it's very discouraging to work on something that isn't the first or you know there are very many of. First year in college, the first full-time group project we had was done by all the 200 other CS students at the college, in groups of 5. That's 20-30 groups all developing the same software according to the same 40 page requirements package. Oh, and they used the same project for 3-4 years. That's 120 solutions to the same essential problem and is very demotivating, even for students.
Glad you realised it's not the end of the world. Just remember there are 6 billion people in this world. Probably 1 billion have internet access. The likely hood someone else has the same idea as you is very high. You discovered half a dozen people with the same idea. But if half a dozen people have a product to show there where probably hundreds who initially thought that such a service would be a good idea. The only thing separating those hundreds with the half a dozen is action.
So instead of competing with hundreds on the idea alone you are competing with half a dozen on implementation. I'm not sure about you but I like those odds.
I was listening to a 'To The Best of Our Knowledge' interview last week with Chuck Close, the American painter, and he said something interesting and relevant. He said that we are all very good at problem solving, but not good at problem creating. Problem creating is the process of finding interesting challenges. He found it in his art, and suggested that if we can find our own interesting, unique challenges, we don't need to find ways to keep up with everybody else, or worry about others taking our ideas. Kind of interesting and unique perspective.
I don't like the statement that "Hacker News ruined my morning." That seems like you're either creating a link-bait headline trying to appeal to the emotions of HNers or you're trying to shift responsibility from yourself to another entity.
I really don't think that you're trying to do either; it seems to me you just wanted to vent and share your thoughts. Though, you may want to consider how your headline may read to your intended audience. I typically don't respond well to these types.
Use the fact that competition exists as validation for a market. I wish you the best of success.
This could have been me writing this article! In fact, it's ironic because just this morning I wrote post on HN asking if I should release early or add some more polish for this very reason. No, my site isn't related to books! Yes, variations of the problem I'm trying to solve get announced here more often than I would like to see! :-) I guess your post was better written, cause mine only got a few points! Maybe your title worked!!!
Competition proves the market. Why are you disappointed to learn that other people might have the same idea? It means it's worth pursuing if more than one person is doing it, right? Just add your own flavor, and have integrity and faith in the individual value of your product.
On the other hand, if your faith in your product hinges on how avant-garde the concept is, I don't think you're going to routinely be satisfied with your creations.
The sting is even worse when you have invested time and resources already.
This is why they say release early and release often. Try not to fret too much. At least you didn't spend tons of resources on an iOS app to have Apple change the terms of service in a manner that you can't comply with. Sucks to be those guys.
If anything, having competitors validates that you have good ideas; there is also a clear, widespread pain if some one else is tying to solve the problem.
If your implementation is indeed better, and you can hustle, its likely that you'll do well.
It's bad when you find out that idea that you working on is already develop by someone else. But if that happens you have two options: try with some other idea or try to make 'stolen' idea better : )
This guy just doesn't cut it to be an entrepreneur.
Other start-ups developing a product similar to yours will help you boost your business, not sink it. PG made it by doing something other people were making too. He thinks the programming language his company were using gave them an edge. I don't think so. I think it wasn't about the programming language itself: it was about smart people who were able and dared to really think different, knowing that "different" was "better".
Your business is just your people and you, not your product. Think about building a great team, not a great product.
How a typical person thinks: "Lots of people are already doing that. I give up. They've taken all the money there is and ever will be for this product/service!"
How a typical business person thinks: "If I can take 1% of each of my 5 competitors' market share, I can make $x millions. Better head over to EDGAR and read some 10-K reports."
How uber-startups like Google and Facebook think: "If I can take the majority of all of my competitors market share through superior marketing and technology, and increase the size of the market at the same time, then we're worth $XX billions."
Notice how you don't have to invent anything completely new, just innovate on existing stuff that's proven to make money.
If that's what the typical business person thinks, they're wrong. It's not about taking fractional shares of existing markets; it's about finding defensible niches. Fractional market shares have a way of going to zero if your product is just a me-too.
Who said anything about a me-too? The point is not that fractional market shares are a guaranteed route to success, but rather that they are not a guaranteed route to failure.
It's true you didn't say "me-too product", but it's an important point. There are lots of me-too products in the world, so a lot of people do think that way.
I think you're wrong. Take a look at the toilet paper selection at the supermarket next time you're there. Every single brand you see has a fractional market share, and very few of them are going to zero any time soon. There's millions of dollars to be made in wiping asses.
According to your theory of market dominance, there should be only one type of TP available after all the 'fractional' players go to zero. Or at the very least, several 'defensible' niches - how exactly would that apply to the squares of paper you wipe your shit with? To me they look the same. They're rolls of paper on cardboard tubes that differ in price and softness.
You answered your own question: they differ in price and softness. There's a "basic TP" niche and a "premium TP" niche -- and maybe a couple more, but not many.
Okay, you say, since no two products are exactly identical, how is my talk of niches not vacuous? Because it's not enough for the products not to be identical: they must be differentiated in the mind of the market. That is, the differences must matter to at least some part of the market. If you have a small market share, and you are unable to differentiate your product from its competition in some way -- price or features or both -- your market share will go to zero. The world is littered with examples; I'm sure you can think of plenty yourself.
Ask any angel or VC you know what they think of a business plan that proposes to capture a small fraction of a huge market, without laying out a viable marketing plan for differentiating the product.
It's funny we're talking about Toilet Paper. You do realise that 2.6 Billion people don't have access to a western toilet? But there are massive marketing and social pushes ( http://www.worldtoilet.org ) to increase the size of this market dramatically.
I'm not talking about ideas that angels or VCs like, I'm talking about running a real god damn business. Your mind has been twisted into thinking like a VC. You're talking about the toilet paper market having niche market segments. Are you out of your mind?
Angels and VCs want 100x+ multiple exits. Business people don't need that, or anything at all like it. What they need is a business with customers.
I do believe the toliet paper market is "oversaturated", so to speak ;).
The major brands of toilet paper are made by corporate juggernauts like Proctor & Gamble, Kimberly Clark & Georgia Pacific. It would be very hard to break into the TP market.
I see startups (or at least companies much younger than P&G etc) in those spaces too - seventh generation and 'simple' are the ones that pop into mind first.
It's also about creating new markets. Identifying something along the way and taking your business in a different direction. There are successful businesses today started out as something else, and evolved in time.
This continuous change of the landscape might work very well for the guy who's behind the competition and doesn't make all the money yet. Those that make the money are usually reluctant to experiment with new paths. They usually fear risking what they've got.
It's basically so unpredictable and things evolve so fast right now, that it's a wild guess what you, or you competition could look like in 2 years.
I know this is the opposite of "scratch your own itch", but I always found that advice overrated. I have always been much more successful scratching other people's itches.