[HN Gopher] Competition is not market validation
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Competition is not market validation
Author : tonioab
Score : 41 points
Date : 2026-02-10 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ablg.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ablg.io)
| leetrout wrote:
| Ignore the competition. Dont ignore their customers.
| bluGill wrote:
| If they don't have customers you won't either.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| If they don't have customers, they aren't competition.
| themafia wrote:
| Ctrl-F: "Customer" (2 results) [both describing customers as a
| fungible always present entity that must deal with you].
|
| Yea.. maybe change your focus?
| syed123 wrote:
| Why not check your passion and interest regardless of
| presence/lack of competition and then you can play a long game
| instead of being in a reactive state.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Being passionate and interested in a problem doesn't mean there
| is a market for said problem. This doesn't mean that it's not
| valid to feel that way, but a viable business might be hard if
| not impossible to build in that niche. Maybe I'm passionate
| about and interested in ornamental gourd futures [0], doesn't
| mean it's a way to build a business.
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/kzoh1c/i_am...
| syed123 wrote:
| very valid point- but people do start with passion and
| iterate being the keyword based on understanding users and
| the market - however if you jump straight into
| competition/market without having interests or passion then
| you are driven by numbers and other people and have nothing
| to fall back onto in terms of purpose/vision/mission - so
| someone passionate in ornamental gourd futures can use the
| passion in it to underdtand other peoples/passion or
| interests in it and then in the process develop your
| understanding of them to feed what they are looking for
| coming from your evolved passion now - youtube was hotornot
| pics to begin with!
| bluGill wrote:
| Depends on your passion/interest.
|
| This article is assume startup - you raise a lot of money and
| get a lot of people to help you build the product fast to get
| to the very large market. A valid strategy and can earn you a
| lot of money if there is a large market you can serve.
|
| However there are a lot of markets that are not that big. If
| your passion is something Pet Rocks - that will probably be a
| tiny market (it was once big for a short time, but the time is
| over and unlikely to come back - thought maybe I'm wrong). You
| are unlikely to every grow a large business because there are
| so few other people interested in your passion.
|
| There are other markets where your interest/passion will make
| one person a nice income, but can never scale to a large
| company. The investors this article is concerned about want
| nothing to do with it: they can never make their investment
| back. However you as a person can make a lot of money in this
| niche self funding the company and growing no faster. It will
| be hard work, and it will only get you into the lower end of
| the upper middle class, never rich - but that can be a nice
| life.
|
| Or you can discover the hard way there is only so much you can
| take of your interest before you burn out.
| syed123 wrote:
| then you can passionaltey study people and find if they are
| not passionate in your passion then what passions they have
| and make their passions evolve your passions to passionately
| help their passions.
| nkotov wrote:
| This one strikes straight to the heart. We pivoted post YC batch
| to what was hot at the time and saw a lot of competition (some
| raising millions more than us). We thought this market
| validation. Five years later, almost every single company on that
| list has either died or pivoted.
| joshuamcginnis wrote:
| My views on market validation have changed with age. What I've
| observed after talking to hundreds of founders is that it's now
| so easy for someone to enter a market that it seems like those
| that are successful are the ones who managed to _create_ their
| market. No matter how smart or how good your idea is, many many
| successful ventures are successful because of some intangible /
| hard-to-reproduce circumstance that allowed them to create the
| market. It could be investor /pr momentum, connections,
| regulatory friction or some other intangible, but whatever it is
| - it's not something that could be easily reproduced because it's
| nuanced for every founder and company.
| syed123 wrote:
| i guess its called the unfair advantage and there is even a
| book by the same name!
| tehlike wrote:
| competition is for losers. https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-
| thiel-competition-is-for-...
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