I discovered another startup is doing almost *exactly* my idea…and I couldn't be more excited.

Hi Hackers!

Last week, I was browsing the r/LanguageLearning subreddit and found this post about a book being offered that allows you to learn German while reading in English. By swapping common English words for German vocabulary, readers can quickly amass a working vocabulary in a target language using repetition and context (and, in this particular case, color-coding for added memory retention). Cool, right?

That's exactly what I thought, too.

For nearly two years, I've been building a pipeline to do exactly this thing with existing books (it's called Prismatext). Two freakin' years, working in stealth. And this person/people comes in and steals the thunder that is rightfully mine?! (/sarcasm)

There were times in the last two years that, had I heard someone was working on an idea like mine, I would have been disheartened. Maybe, if the news caught me on a bad day, I would have spiraled into depression or…god forbid…abandoned my project.

But when I saw that post the other day, I felt so much lighter. I actually chuckled as I realized how similar our ideas are…and weirdly enough, felt a kind of kinship with this other anonymous creator, who probably also spent a large amount of time working in the dark.

The post excited me for a number of reasons, among them:

1. Idea Validation from the creator: reading the post and website, one can sense how proud OP is of their creation. They, like I, have spent countless hours mulling over this same problem, clawing away at the shadows in search of the answer we knew all along was out there. Now we have something to show for it.
2. Idea Validation from the customers: the response for this post was far larger than anything I'd anticipated for a niche way to learn a language. And OP did a wonderful job of describing it to the curious and defending it to the skeptics. It was like getting a little preview of some of the things I'll have to talk about when I launch.
3. Confidence in my own process: without being too presumptuous, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how doing "blended language" editions of books can only ramp up in a linear fashion. If done the wrong way, launching a new book in one blended language could take several weeks, if not months. The ramp up to scale needs to be steep, which is why I spent so long building: if the demand called for it, I could release a new book—in half a dozen blended languages—every few hours.
4. Confidence in my own product: my background is in publication design. I spent years designing book covers and typesetting interiors, and in doing so acquainted myself with the myriad ways to build an ebook. My end product is a reflowable ebook with popup translations for the words and phrases readers get stuck on. The book will work on any device: browser, iOS Books, Google Books, Kindle, or Kobo. And, again: I can output new books hourly, so the volume at which I can add new books will be very high as well.

All that to say: ideas aren't really all that important until you've built something. I had the idea for my product a solid decade before I even learned how to code, and were it not for a random dinner conversation about it, the idea would still be out there in the ether—but there would only be one player in the arena, and it wouldn't be me.

Thanks for reading!