| Pretend you have a magic clone wand. Wave your wand at any target. What do you have? 1). No customers, visitors, or social proof. 2). No marketing strategy. Sure, you can announce to an uncaring world that your clone is cheaper. So what? People don't buy Github because it is the cheapest option. They buy it because it is Github. To the limited extent that cheap is itself compelling, cheap compels terrible customers to use you... Until someone undercuts you, at any rate. Pray that that day is soon, because the pathological customers attracted by Lowest Price Here are like dementors with keyboards. One glance at a support mail and your soul will get sucked out of your very eyes. There are gigantic swathes of the human experience where startups are not as thick on the ground as "Ooh I should solve the problems of git using programmers." Go over to the BLS. Look at occupational listing. Sort by gender. If you see Engineer at top, invert sort. Pick anything now visible on your screen. Solve their problems. You'll have people laughing for years that there is any money in what you are doing. P.S. Github's weakness on pricing, to the extent it exists, is that there exist customers for whom it is too cheap to take seriously. P.P.S. Feature parity is unnecessary to sell many types of software and is sometimes actively harmful. |
One of the mistakes I made early on when participating on HN was giving a shit about what folks here thought about my startup ideas. Funny thing -- I didn't even realize it. I would just suggest something, somebody would trash it, and I would move on without working on the idea some more. Unknown to me, I was letting popular hacker opinion be some kind of gatekeeper to what I wanted to spend my time on.
To your point, don't do this. If other engineers like the idea -- building some new toolset or creating the 4000th version of an online scrum tool -- run away from it. Run far, far away.
I had a cousin who was always trying get-rich-quick ideas. One year it was zero-down real-estate. Then it was investing. Then it was MLM. Then it was something else. He read some books, get jazzed up, and work as hard as he could. But, of course, none of it ever worked out.
One day I was speaking to him on the phone and he was very excited. Yet again. I kind of sighed inwardly, but then he described to me how he was going to make a renewable power product -- how the cost per material had a significant differential, how he had contacts in the import business, how the fabrication could be done at a small improvement -- all nickel and dime, small percentage, boring stuff. You know, distribution channels, marketing, production models, etc.
It was then I knew my cousin was finally going to make it. He graduated from dealing with all the emotions around startups to actually working the mundane, small, detailed problems that really make a business hum. There won't be any books or seminars on how to create a renewable energy manufacturing business -- he's making up the book as he goes along. That's what real business building is about. Not about creating some cool new thing or solving world hunger. Of course, nothing wrong with chasing a dream -- as long as you don't delude yourself and know what the numbers say. The trick is graduating from "feel good" startups to actual, real, down-and-dirty, numbers-driven, boring startups.