Ask HN: Could you create a competitor to your company at 10% of the cost?
5 pointsby TheAlchemist3 hours ago3 comments
  • apothegm23 minutes ago
    Nope. 90% of my company’s employees are doing highly skilled work that requires interacting with other humans face to face with physical presence.

    And turning our tech over to AI would undoubtedly be a disaster of security and compliance fails in a highly regulated industry — if it didn’t simply hit a complexity wall that it couldn’t spaghetti code its way through.

    And that’s setting aside UX. We have in-depth conversations around twice a week to make decisions at the intersection of data needed for business logic, compliance constraints, and managing both of those while keeping UX “delightful”. I’m not convinced an LLM will ever be able to handle those with halfway decent judgement.

    YMMV if your product is an issue tracker, CRM less complex than salesforce, or newsletter platform, etc.

  • Eaglo2 hours ago
    I think you're onto something. I started my own firm on a shoe-string compared to my boss' existing company and have been doing quite well. The hardest thing may be lead generation, but I poached a bunch of those too.
  • al_borland2 hours ago
    A toy-version MVP might be cheap. What happens when you need to deploy it, scale it, secure it, support it, upgrade it, market it, etc.

    A large company is more than a single GitHub repo.

    • radioshakeshack33 minutes ago
      Exactly. This is like the greenfield vs brownfield or 'Twitter clone in a weekend' arguments. Cost and complexity grow drastically with success and scale.
      • TheAlchemist20 minutes ago
        I know that, that's why I'm asking the question. But if cost and complexity grow drastically with scale, my question is even more relevant, isn't it ? If it's easy to spin up a competitor, we should rather see more small companies, not less.
        • al_borland12 minutes ago
          There have always been a million small POC clones of popular apps. Twitter, Trello, <insert popular todo app>, etc.

          Doing a subset of what a market leader is doing, but worse, with no path to scale or support, isn’t going to go anywhere.

          Yesterday someone vibe coded a password manager in 20 minutes and posted it here. Should anyone use it? Absolutely not. It’s a security nightmare, won’t get support, and the architecture is complete trash, requiring the use to run a local server the background that the app and browser extension talk to. Not to mention it will likely never see an update.

          Successful competitors do something new. A lazy vibe coded clone doesn’t nothing new, and they don’t even do all the basics.