Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

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While execution > idea most of the time, I think it's become a little too accepted, for its own good. Ideas are worthless when they're another spin on a web 2.0 site, or rather a spin on something that already exists. From the link:

Oh, and what was the company? It was yet another Web 2.0 flavor of a question-and-answer, poll-your-friends site with a distant revenue model and no user acquisition strategy. Ran if for two years before we shut it down with almost no revenue achieved. Shocking, I know.

Going stealth is more worth it if your idea isn't in the same universe as ye old web 2.0 social network/web analysis/etc. tool. Hint: these aren't real businesses. This is especially true if your idea is simple to implement technically, but not necessarily simple to implement on a whole.

And the idea that "someone is already doing it" is far from a truth. There are plenty of HUGE problems that no one is working to solve - most likely because they aren't problems with technical solutions. The notion that "ideas are worthless" is really only valid if the idea isn't all that original in the first place.

I was thinking similar things all the way through the article.

We have a start-up in the works. The technical side is fairly easy, and many people could do it. Our value is built on the non-technical stuff, which relies on a network of people and resources that have taken years to develop. We've also done our homework, discreetly, so we really aren't worried about having to pivot dramatically on day one or about not being able to handle running costs for long enough to establish the product.

The biggest risk in our business plan is that we are relying to some extent on time over money, because we're self-funded. We know of no-one making a similar product to us, but there are businesses making other kinds of products that would naturally compete for the same money from the same customers, which makes us mutual threats. If one of them heard what we were planning, they could throw way more money than we currently have into moving sideways, and potentially sabotage our network before we reach critical mass, even if they didn't then establish an equivalent product themselves.

Given the nature of the markets involved, there is a very real prospect of that happening. If you were in our position, would you not keep things quiet until that window had passed?

No, I wouldn't. If your network of people and resources is your key competitive advantage, then you want to maximize it -- and you can do this a lot more effectively if you're discussing things publicly. Alternatively if your network is so easily sabotaged, well, that'll happen in any case after you launch, so better to work through the issues now.

> If your network of people and resources is your key competitive advantage, then you want to maximize it -- and you can do this a lot more effectively if you're discussing things publicly.

Why? We are building our network as fast as we are able, much of it via direct personal introductions within a relatively exclusive club. I don't see how letting other people outside that club know what we are doing gains us anything useful.

Also, if there are lterally only a few people in the world who can provide what you need and you can get most or all of them to sign up to your idea, your network is unassailable. If someone who has contacts with the network from other dealings gets in there first, you're in trouble. So it doesn't follow that a network that is highly vulnerable now would still be so after launch.

if those businesses see values in "moving sideways", and in the process sabotaging your network, wouldn't they have taken your clients anyway, even without the benefit of breaking your company?

if they don't see the value in it, even if they know what you are doing, isn't it unlikely that they would waste money just to crush a would-be competitor?

Unless you are saying what your company is doing is so creative and valuable but yet no one has thought of it before. But IMO a main point of the article is that this is highly unlikely, and even if it is the case, your competitors aren't seeing the value in it, just like how google was in the plain sight of yahoo for so many years. i m not saying you should actively let them know what you are doing, but it probably wouldn't be a big deal even if they get wind of it.

I think perhaps you're seeing a false dichotomy here.

In a nutshell, we are new and high-tech, our competitors are established and low-tech, and we are aiming to solve essentially the same problem for mostly the same people in an easier way.

Perhaps a good analogy would be Netflix. They saw the potential for emerging technologies to disrupt an existing market and built a successful business around doing so, all but killing the old video rental store model in the process. What would have happened if, before Netflix had become established, one of the major rental store chains or perhaps a coalition of big movie studios had realised the potential of those new distribution models and the danger to the existing happy cash generators, and consequently thrown $100,000,000 into getting their own service off the ground? Whether or not the new distribution models ultimately took off, it's a good bet that the world would be a little less red today.

Now, we're building a different product and we're in a much smaller niche market, but the basic risk is the same: if an established dinosaur knew about the idea and realised the impact it could have on their happy cash generators, then it would make sense for them to move sideways and block us to retain their customer base, even if they would otherwise have no need to adapt their existing offering. They almost certainly don't know how to do that today, but they have so much more money than us that they could hire a dozen consultants until they found someone who did. Then they could afford to hire a team ten times our size to beat us to market, while using leverage from their existing network to make our lives difficult until our money ran out.

There's an excellent book that I'm reading called "The innovator's dilemma" which seems relevant to your case. The difficulty with established competitors is that their middle management gets in the way--that is, if you're charging less and offering less, then they won't bother competing against you because they're focused on up-market customers.

I'm in a very similar situation: building a startup that's not technically complicated and has no real competitors (only substitutes).

I'm trying to stay semi-stealth; avoiding talking about it to startup/techies/online but still asking friends, family, and potential customers.

That question is impossible to answer. We don't know what you are trying to do. We can't know what your position actually is.

I've told you that:

1. the biggest risk we have identified in our business plan is being squished by a sideways-moving competitor that has decided to invade the part of the market we are attempting to take;

2. they are only going to be able to do this for a certain period of time before we hit critical mass and can defend ourselves;

3. by implication, we do not believe that they will do this without knowledge of both our vision and the fact that we are working on it right now; and

4. we believe there is a real danger that they would take this action to defend themselves if they could.

Perhaps I wasn't clear, but from our point of view, that is all the justification we need to keep things under wraps for now.

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