Memento Mori
I've been working on APSE for about a year. Until this week, I didn't know of any other applications like it.
Tuesday, Pinboard turned 10 years old. Maciej's post about it had this gem:
What does the future hold for Pinboard? Death! The bus that one day comes for us all! The skeletal, icy hand on an unprepared shoulder! Pain, a flash of light, then numbing darkness. So back up your bookmarks.
Just after I read that piece, I learned of Atlas Informatics, a company that:
- Raised $20 million in 2016
- Shut down in 2016
- And was building almost exactly the same thing as APSE
It was kind of surreal to read the press releases and marketing info - there's quotes that are almost verbatim what I've been telling people about my project.
So here we are today. No fundraising, but also not shut down :)
Hi IndieHackers 👋 Anyone else have a similar experience?
I cut this down from a longer post on my website.
Yes! I think doing background research is super important on this, so that you can see what other people have tried, how successful it was, and whether or not your offering is actually different. Stowbots has had several similar products in the past. Image organization tools are not new, and a couple of the competitors even used machine learning. I say used because it appears none of the companies took off or were successful. I'm optimistic that Stowbots will break the mold because I have much better technology (the machine learning solutions were extremely limited in the past) and I'm targeting a slightly different market.
It's definitely a little eerie to see those dead versions of your company! Something to take seriously. Unfortunately it's not always obvious why an alternative failed. It doesn't necessarily mean the idea is invalid, there could be a hundred other reasons that particular company didn't work out.