Comment by vsupalov
7 days ago
I'm also curious about ways to provide value with a technical project.
The challenge when exploring this topic: the incentive to stay under the radar. Those succeeding don't have much to gain from sharing details here. Worst case: it could invite competitors into their space.
Communities that thrive on growth (e.g., open-source) tend to share freely, but API businesses, especially ones which are easy to execute, often guard their edge.
A recent finding I had, while not necessarily an API: services which help you 24/7 stream a lenghty video file. YouTube live streams seem to work well for those lofi-types of channels, and there are services which are built to enable autopilot live streams.
As a tech person, it is easy to wrongly think that ”anyone can build this” about a prototype you just built.
At the end of the day, it is about what the customer is willing to pay for.
Back when The Pirate Bay was huge, music was essentially free. But Spotify came along and proved people are ready to pay for something better.
ImageMagick is an open source tool for resizing images etc. But some people successfully build API services or SaaS-services on top of it.
It works because people AND businesses pay for convenience.
What space do you have knowledge of? What pains do people have in that domain that can be solved with tech?
Always start with the problem. And start with an industry you know by heart or customer profile you truly care for.
For me that was software developers. I was that customer myself. I programmed a certain kind of solutions, realized there should be an API for this and built that API.
If the cops hadnt also aggressively pursued people "stealing" music (a bullshit proposition to begin with) Spotify would not have won. For most people avoiding a potentially big fine, even if the chance is small, tips the balance into just paying a few bucks (which is itself a huge price concession from the music industry, who would love to charge what CDs used to cost) - but they cant, that would tip the balance back into piracy
True that the full win was due to copyright enforcement by various actors.
However, in the early days of Spotify the ”play any song with a click” was pure magic and nothing piracy could compete with.
A fun anecdote from that time is also that basically the whole Spotify catalogue was full of pirated music — they had not yet secured any music rights and I personally thought they never would succeed with that.
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Which police force was involved in that? In the US, it was the RIAA using private investigators to find people to sue.
Every company has secrets that few people know. If you know an industry intimately you can reverse engineer what the competition is doing. But generally speaking the “tricks of the trade” are non-obvious and make the business.
I know right this very second exactly how I could do a unique twist on my existing business and conservatively make another $1 million a year in profit within 2 years. But I already work 60+ hours a week on this business and I’m making tons of money, and the risk of revealing my secrets to another person to build the new business is simply too high.