Welp! My project was a seal
For my first SaaS-ish product, I wanted to solve an interesting problem in social media for creators/artists (my girlfriend is an artist). On Instagram, you are only allowed to have one link in your profile and no links anywhere else! This was true...until their recent update a couple of months ago, where they allowed people to now post links in Stories. I figured this was a great opportunity to build a service around this new ability!
I wanted to build a feature that was not present in Instagram - the ability to create calendar events and share them with your followers, so that they get an alert at the right time. I proudly named this AddToCal and even bought the clever and short domain name addtoc.al. This can be really useful for live-streamers and artists who do IRL shows, without having to go through the hassle of making an Eventbrite event (the hassle being that all your followers now have to create Eventbrite accounts just to register for the calendar invite). It all sounded so perfect.
I started banging out an MVP and had something to launch within 4-5 days! I worked furiously at it and it was awesome. I shared on twitter and started fixing bugs based on my friend's beta testing of it. Great so far! No users yet, but hey, I have a working, relatively bug-free MVP in about 1 week. Little did I know what was lurking in the future for me...
Ben Evans published a famous essay a year ago, titled Are you a seal? In it, he addresses the concern that many startups have, which is - will Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook enter your space and compete with you? Will your idea get crushed by one of these sharks? He lists the signs of a "seal" (i.e. company that attracts one of the "sharks'" attention) to help you identify whether you will be outcompeted by the sharks or not.
Sadly for me, despite having read this piece, I did not recognize my own idea is a total seal. AddToCal tried to do something that Instagram themselves were planning to implement! Their app now has a built-in event creation and reminder system that creators can add to their Stories, and that followers can click on. It is an obvious value-add for them, easy for them to scale, and easy to integrate and implement. A real no-brainer.
Compared to that, my solution was a bit clunky in that you need to create events at an external link and share them in Stories, and have followers open the link in external browser (otherwise it didn't work). I had no chance.
Oh, well. I'm gonna recoup and soon start building my next project! I learned a lot of technical skills when creating addtoc.al and it'll definitely be useful in the future. For now I have been focusing on writing tutorials for the hardware/embedded software community and will soon be building in public again! If you have any questions, wanna connect or wanna chat :) you can hit me up on Twitter. DMs open :D
Thanks for sharing, and good luck with your next project!
IMO being a seal is not always bad news: the bigger the shark, the slower they’ll swim (to stretch the analogy) and the more technical debt and internal bureaucracy they’ll have to overcome.
I’d bet many companies that have successfully ridden the Innovators Dilema path could have been seen as seals in the early days
Interesting, what do you mean by the “innovators dilemma path”? I haven’t read the book
It’s been a while since I read the Innovators Dilemma, so forgive me if I forget some of the nuances. But my understanding of it was that innovative products (ones that go on to completely disrupt an industry) often start out substantially worse and with substantially fewer features than their big incumbent competition.
For example, SSD hard drives were originally much more expensive than spinning disks and had massively less capacity. See also jet-engined airliners: the last propeller planes were amazing and the first jets were dangerous and uncomfortable.
It was a fascinating book that I’d heartily recommend. Began as a shorter article IIRC, and the author was on a few podcasts recently (sadly died last year, I think). I first heard him on the A16Z podcast
Hey, I feel like there's still value in what you built.
You had a focus for instagram, but since it would also work on any website (or well, anywhere you can post a link), you can probably remarket/refocus your target audience and trying a bit more before you give up.
Maybe you could try to package it as a wordpress plugin?
Many businesses are on wordpress. They need to publish events (sales, events happening at their store/restaurants, bands coming to their venue).
Maybe having a plugin to create events would appeal to them?
If you go along with this idea, let me know!
Thank you for the idea @martdi! I checked the Wordpress app marketplace and it's super-saturated with calendar tools. However I took your idea further and tried checking a whole slew of marketplaces, which are on this cool airtable page I found (https://airtable.com/shr3DQmms9sEfg9zE/tbllF41uyhYyQzCYI). Looks like there are quite a few marketplaces, especially email marketing tools, where there is no existing add-to-calendar button at all! Strange! I will pivot to this direction and give it a go :)
This happened to me with my first build in public SaaS. Spent a month working on an MVP for a link in bio SaaS that allowed you to take payments on-page, with direct integrations with both Shopify and Stripe.
Just before launching the MVP, LinkPop.com by Shopify launched and so did Stripe Payment Links 😅
Oh bummer! It’s almost like your idea was too good 😅 Hey at least it means you built something that people actually want
Hey 👋 Bhavesh
Kudos on seeing the opportunity and pouncing! Great stuff! 👍
Let’s hope your next product is a White Pointer and can fend for itself!
🍻