Build a new kind of thing (define a category) vs copy what works at first
I'm building a tool for developers and every day I think about this tension. I'm torn between (1) building a new kind of thing and thus defining a new product category and (2) basing at least the initial product on a large and successful incumbent competitor.
If I choose route 1, I'd be committing to months of effort building it while trying to figure out if the thing is worth building—all while there's no revenue, or no meaningful revenue.
If I choose route 2, I'd be spending a few months on building many of the same features a competitor already has just so that I can get some traffic to the site (and hopefully some revenue) and thus give myself time to figure out what the product should ultimately be.
At this point I'm still unclear on how the product would evolve if, for example, I were given three engineers to work under me for two years. I definitely have ideas, but I'm not confident that the current ideas are worth it.
More concretely, the product I'm talking about is https://wirechunk.com but I'm sure many other people encounter this same dilemma. In my case I can either go all-in with the templating engine capability as a SaaS tool, which is a new kind of product the way it's built, or turn the site into more of a Stack Overflow type of forum where my goal would be to drive traffic to the site and eventually show ads.
I'd love your take on this, and:
- Have you had to make such a decision in the past?
- If you're a software developer or work in operations/DevOps, does Wirechunk seem like a tool you'd use if I went all-in with the templating feature?
My portfolio is filled with mostly failure so take this with a grain of salt, but I like to go with #2 and "copy" a competitor. Reason being is I'm a good dev, I can build whatever, but I'm a terrible marketer and have no idea how to reach people. So if I go the #2 route I already know there is a market, I can see how other companies are pitching the product, and I can even see their ads/keywords and reuse it to fit my needs. If I go the #1 route I have to do it all myself.
However, I'll say it's pretty important to have value add over the competitors or some way to differentiate. It's very hard to get people to choose the new unknown product when it does exactly the same the established one.
This is a great point, thank you. A bit of an update on my end: the next day after putting up this post I had a major breakthrough in how to pivot my startup. I realized that there's an opportunity that's similar to what I'd already built (so I wouldn't need to throw everything away) and would solve some real pain points rather than just sounding like a cool idea. I've since completely redesigned much of the site and am working on simplifying/removing some functionality and building out the new features.
I also want to thank @samrose for his comments in this post because they helped push me toward deciding to do a major pivot. I realized that the feature I was focusing on wasn't something that would clearly bring a lot of value to customers and that people likely wouldn't want to pay for it.
But this new approach is already coming together much better in this regard. I plan to write about my pivot sometime in the next few days. :)
Big believer in brutally self validating ideas, so I'll say I don't really see the value here. What problem are you solving, how are you making money, how many customers can you get. Answering the basics in writing helps.
Thanks for the questions... it always helps to get someone's honest assessment. The problem I'm trying to solve is the amount of time that developers (and DevOps engineers) spend on writing essentially the same code by hand time after time, and the solution is a way to templatize the code so that next time you just need to put in the parameters for the case at hand and the code gets rendered exactly as you need it. In other words, anytime you notice that you're writing roughly the same code routinely then it'd make sense to create a template that'll save you some time next time.
Does the idea make sense?
I've only soft-launched at this point and haven't done any marketing.
But if it's something that you're actually doing often, it should really be automated with jinja or whatever tool. Going to a UI and rendering your code isn't really automation. I feel this is gonna end up being used more for one off things.
I do think you have a kernel of something here, with the 'UI form from a template' tech, we used a similar approach in a different way at a previous job. But I don't think this a product in it's current form, more like a nifty feature or tool.