Look at what makes you different. The twitter integration is brilliant, it means you can have much faster, realtime conversations bouncing off twitter. That's your angle.
Make the 'Share on Twitter' button more... meaningful. What it really does is open up a chat room for all your twitter followers to join.
I don't want to 'Share' it, I want to open my chatroom up to the world on twitter. Not sure how to word that :)
Can you imagine celebrities getting on board with this? It's perfect. 50 Cent would love this, celebs of that ilk on twitter already spend much of their time bantering with fans and this allows them to do it faster. You just need ONE of those twitter celebs to tweet a link to their chatroom and you've got yourself 10,000 new users.
The culture/community of your product is as important as the tech. Myspace held out for a very long time because, for a while, their product was focused on a different set of users than Facebook. Convore -- right now -- attracts a lot of programmers, designers, startup junkies and other tech folks. There is plenty of room and the market is far from decided: 14 y/o girls (not kidding), moms, music fans, sports followers or whoever else.
There are also a lot of really good ideas that you can apply this technology toward. To me, the most uninspired way to attack this space is to try to make your site a one-stop portal for chat. There are a lot more possibilities if you can bring the chat to other destinations, or allow people to integrate chats with their sites.
You should be aware that being in the startup universe tends to make your worldview myopic. You're hyperfocused on the hundreds of users Convore might have and right now that looks like they are miles ahead. Zoom out for a minute and realize that there are millions of users to be won before this game is decided. You are both still at the very very early part of the curve.
As we've been working on Banterly for the past few months, we've had a lot of the same thoughts. That's a big part of the reason we decided to focus our product on the Twitter community first. Our hope has been that as people discuss topics around various #hashtags that they will have a way to take the conversation to a deeper level rather than overwhelming their followers with @replies.
The comparisons to Convore are more at a feature level and prompted because many of our original ideas were geared toward giving the IRC community something more "up-to-date" (though it's hard to say whether or not open source programmers currently using IRC will ever really leave for anything else anyway).
The hard part about being a solo founder -- you take body-blows like this and you can get hung up on the competition. You need to guard against trying to match Convore feature-for-feature-- definitely stay the course and execute on your core vision. Good luck!
Keep going, nothing has changed. A startup beat you to the punch, not a multinational behemoth (e.g., Google obsoleting Kiko). You both have zero revenue and face the same challenges. A million things could still go wrong for both of you.
They got some good press so you're going to quit? Whatever motivated you to start still applies.
Why the hell would you want to stop your project over the miniscule adversity of a pseudosimilar, vaguely-defined and -implemented platform that hasn't even gained traction yet?
If that's enough to make anyone quit a project, I don't think the startup scene is for that person.
For what it's worth, your project looks a lot more interesting. (Aside from the Flash.)
Yeah...on the one hand you want to keep your head down/keep the blinders on/trust in your gut and just plan on plowing through any obstacles that stand in your way. On the other hand, you want to try to keep your eye on the competitive landscape enough to make sure that you're not going heads down into a wall or that you're spending your time on the project that has the best chance for success.
I think any entrepreneur owes it to him- or herself to consider what "competition" actually means. You shouldn't assume it's a zero-sum game, and only one company can exist. If you look closely enough, you'll also see that competitors don't mirror each other as much as you would think, and they leverage their differences to their advantage.
Launching at the same time as a competitor creates more static in the press. I remember when the movie "Deep Impact" was announced close to "Armageddon". I thought to myself "Jesus Christ, this is too much". I don't think that whichever was the last one to hit the big screen was riding the coat tails of the other, or that the earliest one deserved my attention or money more than the last one.
Should Pepsi have called it quits, because they knew that Coca Cola were doing a coca beverage? Of course not. A competitor can be a pain in the ass in some ways, but it also makes for a great way to analyze your market and customers without looking inwards, which can be very difficult for anyone. If they gain traction, you'll know that there's a market.
If they die, you'll have their example as a cautionary tale; if you don't have a lighthouse to navigate by, navigate around the ship wrecks ahead of you.
I think he's annoyed that Convore launched a similar project and received some good press and community love (as little as it is outside the distortion field of the Valleysphere of Techcrunch and HN).
I always think of ReadWriteStart's mantra that "the early bird gets the worm; the second mouse gets the cheese".
"Is it important to be the first one out with the 'same' idea" is one of the many inane theory-crafting discussions that serve little other purpose than discourage people from launching.
Good points...there's so much that goes into making the decision to go forward on any project. Competitors are just one thing to consider. There are maybe other more important things like does this solve a pain point? For example, do people really feel the pain of trying to hold direct conversations on Twitter? Would they prefer to have a real time discussion? If so, how many people would potentially use this type of app? How big is the market? Etc.
Definitely continue developing! I believe this space is wide open. With the death of Google Wave, I've been looking for good, free, persistent chat. Something like Campfire, TalkerApp, and others. I think XMPP integration, a nice API and embeddable content would be good things to work on.
We're working on that right now. We have persistent XMPP based chat with embed support. Try it out, my email is in my profile if you have any questions.
In the scope of your story, I have two words that come to mind:
Market. Validation.
Building something revolutionary and brand new is a long, painful path of combatting misunderstanding and selling people on something they don't even know they need yet.
Regardless of who else they see in the market, now you've got something you didn't have before: a known market, and the validation that someone else saw value in that market as well. Let them do the hard work of teaching people why this solution is needed - and then come in with your distinct vision and value to show the people that are now looking that you're an option they should consider.
A quick anecdote from a recent experience I had with the company I recently started working with - we produce http://www.postmarkapp.com.
I've been friends with the founders for a long time and know their vision and capabilities for building a great company very well. But unlike our other product http://www.beanstalkapp.com - Postmark laid in a relatively new marketplace. The challenge wasn't getting people to use our product, it was getting them to realize why they needed our product in the first place. That's a high barrier to climb, and the team was already doing a remarkable job before I joined.
3 weeks into my first month, another little company - you might have heard of them, they're called "Amazon.com" - introduced a "competing" service to Postmark. Now THATs about a monday morning.
Much of the internet, including some folks on HN, predicted our demise. But the more we taked about it, the more excited we got. Amazon just entered the market we were looking to serve. We know that our style of serving our customers fundamentally differs from AWS, so we'd compete on that edge. Markets are big, and diverse. You don't need the entire market to be successful.
And Amazon had just opened the door for many of our potential customers that don't fit their market to discover us instead, without us having to do anything new.
Conversations with customers in the last month have confirmed this. The very things that had us wondering "what does this mean" on day one of the SES launch have helped us hone our focus on how we serve our market.
Great ideas don't make great businesses - great markets make great businesses. Amazon saw what we'd already seen, and validated it.
There's 4 ways to enter a market and win.
1) First
2) Best
3) Cheapest
4) Luckiest
If you can't be one, you've always got the other 3 to try out.
For example, I'd argue Microsoft was a combo of 1, 4 and 5, and perhaps 3 -- with respect to OS's. But definitely 4 (the IBM/MS-DOS thing) and 5. In contrast, Apple's goal has been 2. Google was clearly not 1 with respect to web search, instead, 2.
Building a business isn't about 'a punch'. It's about hard work, day after day for a long time.
Convore has got a nice UI, they haven't really got traction yet, and there's space for tons of chat like services. They're nothing new, they've been about for decades and they'll be around for decades yet.
Right now Convore have something like 200 users online. That's not unachievable by any means...
The people who will ultimately make such a service successful haven't heard of either of you yet.
It's not a winner-take-all market — in fact cozy separate spaces could be preferred.
So: full speed ahead. Perhaps keep an eye on each other for novel discoveries of user-pleasing features, perhaps shade your marketing towards users/regions the others haven't yet emphasized (so there remains the chance you find an adoption-gusher first).
I like the concept of Convore -- if it were an internal product, or a product I could run within my own firewalls, I think it'd make a brilliant enterprise tool.
What I dislike about Convore is the same thing I dislike about Quora, Digg, et al., in that it caters to far too large a population.
There is generally great conversation, but I cringe every time I see a question like "What is a function?" or something equally inane.
Not sure if this is due to the sudden traffic spike, but discussion pages keep on reloading. It is near impossible to post comments before the page refreshes.
You know, at first blush I would want to throw in the towel as well, but on second thought you really might consider making a proper go of it. The idea has now been validated by a lot of smart people, and frankly you've got a solid MVP going. I'm leaning toward the general sentiment of comments on here. :)
Thanks! We do too. :-) Naming websites is one of our least favorite things to do, so we consider ourselves lucky to have one that fits our idea so well.
Actually--we already do this, as long as the URL is the only thing posted in the comment. The next step, parsing URLs from comments, is on my TODO list. :-P
Make the 'Share on Twitter' button more... meaningful. What it really does is open up a chat room for all your twitter followers to join. I don't want to 'Share' it, I want to open my chatroom up to the world on twitter. Not sure how to word that :)
Can you imagine celebrities getting on board with this? It's perfect. 50 Cent would love this, celebs of that ilk on twitter already spend much of their time bantering with fans and this allows them to do it faster. You just need ONE of those twitter celebs to tweet a link to their chatroom and you've got yourself 10,000 new users.
It's twitpic for chatrooms.
Promote it to celebrity tweeps, hard.