Stephan Seidt
4y ago
Working in tech and learning to become a writer of ✨words✨ Software development, food, video games with an artisanal dusting of sarcasm.
Nothing like friends dropping links to newly launched competing products without comment, right?
I’m not intimidated by it anymore, because I’ve collected enough experience and convinced myself that it really doesn’t matter. So now when someone sends me a new thing, I thank them and confidently explore what I can learn.
Here’s 3 flavors of that and why you shouldn't be worried about any of them.
“Ugh, someone tried solving this in the 90s/5yrs ago!!1 🧐”
A lot changes in 5 years, especially in tech:
New, transformative technology reaches maturity: WASM
Old technology becomes radically affordable: Free* egress in Cloudflare R2
A virus appears and people are suddenly willing to scan QR codes
For every successful company today, there are legions of dead ones “doing the same thing” that failed for reasons you can learn from.
“OMG, HyperPoop just launched ahead of our product 🥴”
When I started as employee #1 at Contentful in 2012, I had every other SaaS CMS mapped out in my head.
Markets are big. It takes years and immense effort to capture big chunks of your market. Your competitor is not going to suddenly steal the entire market from under you (unless you’re Snapchat, in which case you deserve it). Even if their landing page is really shiny and much better than yours. As a fun exercise, think of companies you were intimidated by in the past.
Most of them won’t exist anymore.
“Werner Vogels just announced our product on stage 😳”
This happened to a couple of friends who’s product was announced as an AWS service. I remember they were concerned at first: Even their infrastructure was hosted on AWS, so they thought about moving to a different provider. I haven’t checked in with them recently, but their web and API domains still resolve to EC2.
Also, their team is now 5 times as big as it was back then.