Most of the businesses in the list are very easy to copy. There are neither rocket science, neither patents to protect them, neither big money to pay lawyers to protect their work.
Knowing how well the product sells, you can copy it piece-by-piece by saving a lot of time trying different approaches. Author of original product already did all the hard work guessing what will work the best. You just come, copy and profit from his work.
This is not true. People who copy will mostly do it for money. Finally the passion for the idea trumps the desire to chase money and your product will eventually suck. On the other hand if you think you can make a better product from existing solution, then there is a good chance of you succeeding.
You can try copying any one of those of ideas for money and see for yourself.
>Finally the passion for the idea trumps the desire to chase money and your product will eventually suck.
I think his point is that the ideas being shared are simple enough not to require that much passion to implement, and the goal being not doing something better, but something economically viable (good enough to generate income).
The obvious counter-question would be: why would people use the worse copy instead of just using the superior original? The answer is that it could be the case for a variety of reasons, one of which is cultural relevance, the original filters geographically, is not internationalized well, people do it differently in different regions, etc. After all, you find companies doing similar things in the same market, it only makes sense there's chance of finding other companies doing the same in different markets (given the conditions to implement the idea are already in place: not that easy pulling an Uber/Lyft in a country where mobile broadband and payment haven't matured).
You're not entirely wrong, but building most products is easier than finding the right audience and being able to sell it to them. That's the business.
From my experience copying a feature is about twice cheaper than trying different approaches. You may not figure out a good way to implement it until you build first version and let people try it. You may need re-iterate to find perfect implementation. The copy-cat will come later to see what you've done and will implement the good solution without iterations.
I don't think this is so simple with one person shops, as knowing one's value propositions, revenue/profit numbers & acquisition channels etc goes vastly beyond the concept of the presumably worthless 'idea' that people usually refer to in this context.
Good for customers but not for business. Competition tends to minimize margins and profits. While main business goal is to make money, competition is against business goals.
Competition can also grow a sector, bringing in many new customers that may have otherwise dismissed an idea or might not have even heard of the idea without the exposure driven by the competition.
Many one-person businesses focus on niches and do one thing great. Often they also offer great (aka personal) support. Also, quite often, they are great in building a community around their service. Additionally, many of the solo entrepreneurs are good teachers and share what they know. All these factors together make their services (and themselves) so valuable that a competitor with a slightly better price will not take away all customers.
You're talking about acquisition channels. Community, blog or webinars are great channels, but there are also organic search, paid search, traditional advertising, native advertising, bundling, paid promotions, upselling. If the copy-cat is better at these, their product will out-sell yours.
Very few of the one-person businesses go for mass markets where you need the paid (ad) channels that you mention. Also, the "channels" I mentioned are not just for acquisition but for enduring relationships. You cannot simply buy trust, an ad will not deliver as much value as a connected and caring business owner.
Here in Sweden, and I suspect in many many countries, revenues and profits and pretty much all numbers in a limited liability stock (the most common kind) company are public information. Here is Spotify for example https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&u=http%3A... (allabolag.se is a third party site aggregating these numbers.)
Also, income statements are public information, yet making both of these public information has not imploded the economy. Rather the opposite it seems. It is for example a huge benefit when you are looking for a job to be able to go to the interview and ask why the company never has made any profit the last five years, just as a simple example. Also very good for anyone in the B2B segment.
Because there is a massive difference between sharing revenues / idea and making a business profitable off a clone.
You could copy a lot of ideas out there right now, but that is the smallest part (in my mind) in making a business out of it. The coding and 'making' of the product, is actually the smallest part.
Getting any consistent revenue, marketing, growing your user base, reducing churn - those are all much harder than actually building or copying something.
There are _many_ ideas on github right now with real working code & permissible licenses you could just grab and try to make a business with. So why aren't there profitable, sustainable businesses popping up all over because of this? (Hint: coding is not the hard part, idea is not the hard part)
There are companies who build commercial products from that open source projects. The most obvious example is format converters. There are tens of products build around free ImageMagick and ffmpeg.
China ( add third world country) can / has copied / cloned apps for their local market , happens all the time. ;-)anyone can copy / clone your app at any time that does not mean the same as copying your business. I'm just sayin.
Patio11 was blogging about his old Bingo Card software for many, many years and became one of the most high-profile members of Hacker News because of it. I don't think a flood of competing Bingo Card software came in.
A lot of the time, finding a good enough niche, a small enough niche, and understanding customer acquisition for that niche is all the "moat" you really need. Remember, your competitors likely don't know your market as well as you do and are probably fighting a harder battle than you initially fought since they have to compete against you.
I swear sometimes recently I feel like I'm reading comments from a weird alternate universe HN where I simultaneously claimed to be Elon Musk and also fabricated everything.
Hello, Earth 2 HNer. Back here on Earth 1 I ran a succession of small software businesses. They're anomalously well-documented; BCC more than any other. If you have access to the Earth 1 Internet you can read the first month'a report where I "bragged" about $24.95 and follow the curve from there. Please give my regards to fellow Earth 2 denizens who told me in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 that publishing numbers would bring a horde of competitors to kill me.
The amount of dis/misinformation in your short comment is astounding. Normally I would ignore posts like this, but I have seen a lot of incorrect (or at best creatively interpreted) patio11 information floating around, so I would like to clarify some issues to the best of my understanding.
- BCC was profitable enough for Patrick to quit his job as a salaryman and maintain a similar lifestyle. Most folks would be shocked at how little money he had to make to do that. The revenues and profits went up quite consistently for the first few years -- that is, until he had bigger fish to fry.
- BCC was profitable enough for Patrick to do lucrative consulting as well as build a second business (I can't recall the order of those at the moment).
- Patrick acknowledges that he spent very little time on BCC after he got the processes down. While he was "making money while he slept", he did quite a bit of stuff in that free time that he needed/wanted to do (e.g., iirc, health, dating/marriage, etc.).
- BCC had declining revenues due to neglect that Patrick acknowledges himself (e.g., not updating marketing). As with many folks who scale businesses, it was not a valuable use of his time (e.g., working on AR had higher expected value).
- AR scaled to a higher level than BCC, and it supported an even better lifestyle while still giving him free time for family and building other things like Starfighter. Sadly, Patrick found AR to be not a terribly interesting problem space and did not build it out aggressively. This is not a problem unique to Patrick (i.e., more interested in working on interesting problems than optimizing income with boring/repetitive work).
- Starfigher turned out to be a bust. Patrick incurred some debt while taking a bigger shot. This is remarkably common, and the number is not a terribly big one for a bust. My understanding is that the debt was paid off (or could have been paid off) when he sold AR.
- I don't want to speak for Patrick, but I imagine that there are a number of reasons he went to work for Stripe -- interesting problem space was probably one of them. Debt issue may have been another, but that was effectively solved with the sale of AR.
I'm not sure why so many HNers denigrate Patrick's achievements. He certainly hasn't optimized for maximum income, but I think that the amount of lifestyle freedom that his businesses gave him is somehow grossly underrated and underappreciated. I can only think that there are a fair number of HNers who are envious.
Don't get me wrong, there are many things that I think that I or others would do differently if we were in Patrick's shoes, but we aren't, and we don't know everything that is going on in his life.
That said, if folks are going to criticize him, at least get the facts right. Patrick is fairly open about his business experiences, and the annual reviews on his blog at kalmuzeus.com are a good start.
There were some, I know of one personally but there were others as well. Not sure what the impact of that was as Patio11 seemed to be squeezing all the blood out of that stone.
For years I thought "bingo card" meant something else that I just wasn't familiar with. Until I actually read about it and it was as simple as cards to play bingo. I believe he sold that business now.
* Building a personal brand - everyone loves to read about business adventures, and the more details the better. Financial details are great for drawing audiences. If you feel your brand could be worth more than the project you're discussing, it's worth it to share
* If your market is developers or software managers or small lifestyle businesses, they'll learn about you through your posts. They're not looking to copy you. You'll be more easily discoverable than those who copy you, so it might be worth encouraging imitators in exchange for increased exposure to your market.
* If your finances are solid (the only reason somebody would copy you) it might give customers who are worried about choosing a small, fragile business enough confidence to use your solution.
Here is a good list of 1 or 2 people software SaaS/websites along with interviews