This truth was one of the first things I learned in the School of Hard Knocks. If you've identified a need that nobody else is addressing, the odds are very high that there's a solid reason nobody else is addressing it.
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.
I think you sort of have to learn things this way. What else are you going to do? Trust random blogs and comments online so much that you'll ignore your inner compass, which drives you to build a product?
2nd+ mover is the best kind of advantage for technology markets. One of the most expensive things is educating the average consumer. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to obtain customers with more specific propositions after they've already drank someone else's koolaid.
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.
You can say the same thing about a stock with low volume and low price. There must be a reason why no one is buying it right? Well, one of the reasons could be that everyone is completely wrong about it. I would avoid believing that since I shifted my strategy into Google (where everyone is) that that is where all the success is. If I told a ML researcher they were better off focusing on web development in the 2010s because that’s where the money is, I would have been hopelessly wrong. Several things can be true at the same time.
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.
This ai generated writing is so grating. I would think someone who spend eight years as an SRE (indicating they’re probably pretty savvy and technically competent), would avoid this crap.
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.
LinkedIn, although I'm not sure LinkedIn was the originator, itself. Self-absorbed overly-dramatic writing like this has plagued LinkedIn forever. There's even a subreddit that makes fun of its authors: /r/LinkedInLunatics.
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.
I bet we could draw a throughline of the overly-dramatic writing style to TED Talks and all the way back to Steve Jobs' presentation style. The pregnant pauses. The short sentences. The holding back on making point for effect. All traced back to early-2000s product launches.
I'm confused– you wrote as if you didn't have competitors and had a new category, but it seems like you did have competitors, and just changed the pricing from variable to flat-rate pricing.
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?
> The sweet spot isn’t an empty market. It’s a crowded market with broken execution.
The broken execution can include being twisted by perverse incentives.
Example: social media tending to converge on a mix of outrage doom-scrolling for engagement, selling out privacy, and force-feeding ads/ideas.
I ran into the perverse incentives problem, in a different space (not social media). Basically, there's a fairly simple solution to a problem for the majority of users/customers with this problem. But they need assistance at scale, like from a tech company, and there are perverse incentives for a company to pretend to solve the problem, while actively working against solving it. There's big demand for a solution, but most of the money is in not solving it, and it's easy money. One big player even acquires most of the competition, and twists them into the same awfulness, just with different veneers. (And, if you're a pair of idealistic cofounders who actually want to solve the problem, and you need funding, you would rather abandon it and work on something less conflicted, than sort through all the investors and prospective CEOs who would tell you what you want to hear, while thinking of it as a warm-fuzzy marketing story for the same awful, and ultimately you'd be misleading your users into the same awful easy-money exit endgame.)
> “How can I compete with them? They have teams. They have funding. They have thousands of customers.”
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.
The problem with that though is to maintain that advantage you usually have to burn money or come up with a tool/process/technology to reduce that overhead. Otherwise you're pulling an Amazon/Uber/etc and burning investment money to acquire customers based on low prices when you'll inevitably have to raise them.
Depends on whether they have economies of scale going on or not. If it's just an email validation service then price should do the trick (given feature parity). You just need to burn through a lot of IPv4 and domains to do a proper port 25 handshake. Not sure how much margin there is left.
The larger competitor presumably already has the benefits of scale too right? You'd have to out scale them and still keep the overhead lower. Maybe your version could appeal to a new market at the new price but unless those customers are magically less work to support your overhead is also going to grow.
In the case of an email validation service, yeah they must have a huge quantity of infrastructure and then throttle it sufficiently to fly under e.g. proofpoint blacklists. But I don't think you can get big discounts on IPv4 so it's just a variable cost, not fixed.
My opinion is that all SaaS pricing will trend to price of compute as vibe coding + open source alternatives with one-click deployment converge
> My opinion is that all SaaS pricing will trend to price of compute as vibe coding + open source alternatives with one-click deployment converge
I think this only happens if AGI actually happens. It can't because the value add of going with a SaaS company instead of a DIY is the support and management that the SaaS company takes on in your place, which requires people.
This truth was one of the first things I learned in the School of Hard Knocks. If you've identified a need that nobody else is addressing, the odds are very high that there's a solid reason nobody else is addressing it.
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.
I think you sort of have to learn things this way. What else are you going to do? Trust random blogs and comments online so much that you'll ignore your inner compass, which drives you to build a product?
2nd+ mover is the best kind of advantage for technology markets. One of the most expensive things is educating the average consumer. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to obtain customers with more specific propositions after they've already drank someone else's koolaid.
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.
thank you john your comments are very well put and I will take it to heart for now and any future attempts at building my own product
have a wonderful day ahead
You can say the same thing about a stock with low volume and low price. There must be a reason why no one is buying it right? Well, one of the reasons could be that everyone is completely wrong about it. I would avoid believing that since I shifted my strategy into Google (where everyone is) that that is where all the success is. If I told a ML researcher they were better off focusing on web development in the 2010s because that’s where the money is, I would have been hopelessly wrong. Several things can be true at the same time.
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.
This ai generated writing is so grating. I would think someone who spend eight years as an SRE (indicating they’re probably pretty savvy and technically competent), would avoid this crap.
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.
You’re absolutely right! It’s not just grating—it’s professionally reckless!
Absolutely! It’s not simply annoying—it’s dangerously careless.
> I’m not charging. No paywall. No “freemium” trap. Just pure value.
This had me drop out of the article..
Where does this style of writing come from? It’s pretty distinct and makes it so easy to detect.
linkedin posts. it's practically the house style.
LinkedIn, although I'm not sure LinkedIn was the originator, itself. Self-absorbed overly-dramatic writing like this has plagued LinkedIn forever. There's even a subreddit that makes fun of its authors: /r/LinkedInLunatics.
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.
I bet we could draw a throughline of the overly-dramatic writing style to TED Talks and all the way back to Steve Jobs' presentation style. The pregnant pauses. The short sentences. The holding back on making point for effect. All traced back to early-2000s product launches.
We gotta add in the "and here's what B2B Enterprise SAAS sales taught me"
We’re not just using words. We’re writing them. Unless we’re not. #slopfest2025
I dropped out at the same sentence.
It hurts to read this please stop. I want to hear your story from you.
I'm confused– you wrote as if you didn't have competitors and had a new category, but it seems like you did have competitors, and just changed the pricing from variable to flat-rate pricing.
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?
> 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.
> The sweet spot isn’t an empty market. It’s a crowded market with broken execution.
The broken execution can include being twisted by perverse incentives.
Example: social media tending to converge on a mix of outrage doom-scrolling for engagement, selling out privacy, and force-feeding ads/ideas.
I ran into the perverse incentives problem, in a different space (not social media). Basically, there's a fairly simple solution to a problem for the majority of users/customers with this problem. But they need assistance at scale, like from a tech company, and there are perverse incentives for a company to pretend to solve the problem, while actively working against solving it. There's big demand for a solution, but most of the money is in not solving it, and it's easy money. One big player even acquires most of the competition, and twists them into the same awfulness, just with different veneers. (And, if you're a pair of idealistic cofounders who actually want to solve the problem, and you need funding, you would rather abandon it and work on something less conflicted, than sort through all the investors and prospective CEOs who would tell you what you want to hear, while thinking of it as a warm-fuzzy marketing story for the same awful, and ultimately you'd be misleading your users into the same awful easy-money exit endgame.)
> “How can I compete with them? They have teams. They have funding. They have thousands of customers.”
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"
The problem with that though is to maintain that advantage you usually have to burn money or come up with a tool/process/technology to reduce that overhead. Otherwise you're pulling an Amazon/Uber/etc and burning investment money to acquire customers based on low prices when you'll inevitably have to raise them.
Depends on whether they have economies of scale going on or not. If it's just an email validation service then price should do the trick (given feature parity). You just need to burn through a lot of IPv4 and domains to do a proper port 25 handshake. Not sure how much margin there is left.
The larger competitor presumably already has the benefits of scale too right? You'd have to out scale them and still keep the overhead lower. Maybe your version could appeal to a new market at the new price but unless those customers are magically less work to support your overhead is also going to grow.
In the case of an email validation service, yeah they must have a huge quantity of infrastructure and then throttle it sufficiently to fly under e.g. proofpoint blacklists. But I don't think you can get big discounts on IPv4 so it's just a variable cost, not fixed.
My opinion is that all SaaS pricing will trend to price of compute as vibe coding + open source alternatives with one-click deployment converge
> My opinion is that all SaaS pricing will trend to price of compute as vibe coding + open source alternatives with one-click deployment converge
I think this only happens if AGI actually happens. It can't because the value add of going with a SaaS company instead of a DIY is the support and management that the SaaS company takes on in your place, which requires people.