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by brennvin 1370 days ago
I'm surprised Figma is worth that much. For a while I was considering bootstrapping a business in this space and I was never very impressed with what I saw of Figma. Does not look that hard to compete with or replicate.
2 comments

You'd never be able to compete because the design is the product. You'd just be stuck copying them, always one step behind.

Their interface's responsiveness is also a consequence of writing a rendering engine in WASM, so you'd have to figure that out too. [1] Plus the real-time collab. I don't know why you pretend as if these aren't difficult engineering problems to solve.

[1] https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

“Does not look that hard to compete with or replicate”

Then why haven’t you? Seems like a good opportunity to make a few billion now that Adobe has set a price.

I hear this all the time on HN. And yet, this rhetoric never seems to follow through.

> Then why haven’t you?

I found another product opportunity that will be faster and cheaper to build. That I believe I could out-compete Figma were I rich does not mean I _am_ rich.

Thanks for the down vote.

Just my opinion, but your original comment comes off as comically dismissive of what Figma has done.

Adobe, a company with literal billions in cash and thousands of engineers, wagers 20 BILLION dollars that it is not easy to compete or replicate what Figma has done. In fact, they attempted to compete with Adobe XD and "lost".

The founders of Figma started working on the beginnings of it in 2012 (perhaps indirectly) and launched in 2016. They also raised 330+ million in VC money to make it happen.

I'm a bootstrapped at heart and love the idea of small companies outmaneuvering giant elephants but suggesting one could outdo Figma, with relative ease, just doesn't sound likely.

All that said, if you truly feel like you can, get out there and do it! Theres billions of dollars waiting for you.