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Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

Company project? Google's design sprint is good methodology.

Personal project?

1. Market research. If it's something worth doing, someone else has done a similar solution. Ideally, the competitor is a hacky solution, built off some forum, community, or an Excel sheet, and has become really tedious. If there is no competitor, there is no market.

2. Pull feature lists out of their feedback of that tool. A couple of hours reading reviews and Reddit discussions does a better job than focus groups.

3. Hack a disposable prototype. Key word disposable. It will be buggy and ugly but do a better job than the existing tool. The key is to gather information.

4. Get feedback from the prototype. Ideally do this in person - you want to see the point where people get excited.

5. Focus on the features people love. Think about suggestions and complaints. Don't implement immediately, but find out why they ask for it.

6. Iterate and improve.

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> If there is no competitor, there is no market.

Wut. If Steve Jobs had thought that or followed this advice, there would be no iPhone.

Many million mobile phones were being sold per year, from 10ish big companies.

Would you like to owe one of those phone or the iphone 1 now ?

I did own one of those Symbian phones for a long time and only switched to a Samsung S2 later on. The iPhone 1 had worse games and was too expensive for the regular things like calls, SMS, music, and photos.

I mean competitors in solving a similar problem, not using the same approach.

The competitor to the iPhone was the smartphone - a device running on Symbian with 9 buttons, Java apps, and Internet access. Or Blackberry. Android and a third unsuccessful operating system was also in development at the same time.

The Wright brothers had plenty of well funded competitors.

The competitor to the car was the horse.

The competitor to transistors was vacuum tubes.

Reddit - forums Airbnb - hotels Uber - taxis Amazon - book stores Blue Apron - grocery stores + recipe sites

There are some exceptions. I'm sure time travel and teleportation has a huge market. But does it?

It's difficult to invent teleportation because there is no attack. Many inventions are variations on others.

And when teleportation is possible, it would still compete with transportation. Prices would anchor on to existing transportation. Why would I teleport to school and risk cancer if I could take a bus? Why would I pay a hundred thousand dollars to teleport to my parents' house if I can just fly to get there in 4 hours and $100?

There are plenty of use cases for teleportation but these have to solve existing problems better. Sending things to space for example, or sending TVs from US to UK.

The case is similar with any other technology, whether it's AR or AI. You can seemingly apply them everywhere, but a good start is to apply them to something they're not solving.

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