Price. They have overhead. They have growth expectations for future funding rounds and tend to overpay to acquire customers when their product is stock valuation.
"Your margin is my opportunity"
My opinion is that all SaaS pricing will trend to price of compute as vibe coding + open source alternatives with one-click deployment converge
Phrases like, “The moment that broke me wasn’t the empty dashboard. It wasn’t the crickets after launch” or “Here’s what I missed: Those competitors weren’t obstacles. They were validation” (random bolding that ChatGPT does omitted) are just so banally awful it makes me weep.
This had me drop out of the article..
Now you're just seeing it on this blog post.
And here on HackerNews, in my post.
Why, you may ask?
Because my intent is to leave you breathless in anticipation for "engagement." With short sentences. That don't let you rest and take in what you read.
Wouldn't that mean that you did enter a validated market with competitors? So there must be some other reason you didn't get revenue?
Right. I think my biggest takeaway from this article is that another engineer discovered that sales and marketing are important and difficult jobs.
JohnFen•1h ago
That doesn't automatically mean that your idea can't be successful, but it does mean that you should take a step back and do a hard rethink. Maybe you can identify the reason everyone else is avoiding it and can eliminate or bypass the problem, for instance. But there almost certainly is a problem that you haven't spotted. Further, it's probably a hard problem to solve, since nobody else has managed it.
This kind of thing is one of the several reasons why you don't want to be the first to enter a product category ("the pioneers get the arrows"). The sweet spot to aim for is to be second or third. Then the market is already validated, and you can also learn how to make your product better by learning from the mistakes of your competition.
meysamazad•50m ago
have a wonderful day ahead
cnity•49m ago
ivape•47m ago
Why do some people 10x their money? They have a certain amount of time, money and risk tolerance. Not everyone can sit around and stay invested in certain convictions.
A truly industrial entrepreneur will be like a good investor. Buy the obvious, bet on the not so obvious, and be prepared to keep working on both.
bob1029•45m ago
For example, if someone created an adversarial/rude variant of OpenAI's offerings I would be very interested. Taking the existing "what works" and targeting segments of that market that are underserved is less risky than direct competition or forging new markets.