The pointless reason to quit
working on an idea
As a curious young person who wants to found a business in the future I listen to a lot of other teams, who are thinking about starting a business or about an idea which fascinates them. Just like me. And one phrase that hits me again and again is the following:
“Our idea already exists, so we quit working on it.”
I hear it over and over again. This statement is so wrong. It is just wrong, because if your idea already exists, you should work on it even more. Do you wonder why? Why should you keep on pursuing your idea, although somebody else had it before or at the same time? Here are the top concerns you might have and why they are pointless:
- “Somebody else had the same idea.” Wonderful — you are on the right track, because someone else identified the need, so the probability that it is actually a need is higher.
- “They had the idea before me, so I have a disadvantage, because they had more time to work on it.” It is no disadvantage if this happens. It brings so many positive circumstances. In the first place you can learn from their mistakes and prevent doing the same. Additionally if it’s a whole new product, which people don’t know, they have the task to introduce this new concept to them. At the moment of time you’re releasing your (similar) product, people already have an idea how the product works.
- “They are earlier on the market. Because of this they are going to have most of the customers.” Yes, that’s right! But only in the first place. As soon as there is a competitor (which is you), who is addressing the same need, people are going to try it. If yours is better, they are most certainly going to change to your service. Additionally by looking at their users, you are able to find out which target group you have to address. This could be exactly the same one or another option you could choose is to conciously decide for another group of users.
- “They received a lot of funding. They now have more resources, we can’t compete with them.” If they got funding, your idea just got verified. Investors did invest in the idea, because they think there’s a lot of potential. But there is more than one investor on the world, isn’t it? The probability that there is some other investor, who also thinks this idea has a big potential is very high. You just have to be a trustworthy team and persuade the investor, that you are going to do a better job, than the other companies. Furthermore there are many other ways to get funding besides investors.
In the end if somebody else had your idea and maybe even got funding, you should work on your idea even harder. These concerns you might have, could be your advantage against your competitor. Every big market segment has several companies who are competing with each other — you just have to be one of the best. Just think about the car industry. If nobody else would have started working on producing cars after Carl Benz introduced the first vehicle of its kind in 1886, we wouldn’t have now so many awesome different brands in the car industry.
My advice:
If you find out, that somebody else had your idea,
start working even harder on it and be better!
