Beaten to the Punch (Convore vs Banterly)
I’ve been working on Banterly ever since I caught the startup bug at Startup School 2010. It started as a simple last minute idea to apply to Y Combinator, but has since evolved into something much more (despite not being accepted). If you haven’t seen Banterly yet, go ahead and take a few minutes to check it out. Here’s a link even: http://banter.ly
~ Intermission ~
Either you saw the announcement from Convore (http://convore.com) the week before last, or you don’t follow startups. If you’re in the latter group, you should probably just skip the rest of this and go start chatting on Banterly (or I suppose…Convore). If you’re in the former, you may have taken one look at Banterly and thought “meh…this is just Convore with less features.” But of course, we hope you thought “Sweet! This is what Convore should have been.”
Regardless, if you’re an entrepreneur like me, you can probably relate to my story. While it’s normal to question any idea over the course of its development, it’s also often a great source of agony and stress for would-be founders. Second guessing yourself is difficult, but even more difficult after getting rejected by Y Combinator.
However, after experiencing all of the ups and downs of startup-idea self-examination, there’s one thing that’s even more agonizing: being beaten to the punch. When I saw the announcement from Y Combinator about Convore less than two weeks ago, I was shattered.
In researching the space over the months we had discovered many competitors, so discovering someone else was nothing new. What made Convore different was that it was actually GOOD, it had buy-in from Paul Graham & Co., and seemed to get instant respect from people in the know—all things I felt needed to be in place to make something like Banterly successful.
Discovering that your ‘revolutionary’ product is suddenly a ‘me too’ product is a bitter pill to swallow. There’s nothing like having your idea validated and taken away from you at the same time.
Somehow I resisted the urge to abandon Banterly (not easy as easy as it sounds) and have been working around the clock ever since to get something presentable ready anyway. Banterly, as we’re releasing it today, is not perfect and has no shortage of bugs (which I am sure will pop up once people start using the service in greater numbers). I am the sole programmer working on it and have only limited time for it (not to mention learning Node.js + MongoDB—both new platforms for me).
So my question to the community is this: What would you do if you were in my shoes? Would you cut your losses and move on to a new idea (we discovered several while working on Banterly)? Would you ignore Convore and go for it? Would you open source the code?
I also want to add one more thing. We have nothing but respect for the folks at Convore and we think their service is fantastic. Even if we end up moving on from Banterly, we’re really happy that Y Combinator decided to support such an awesome team with such a great idea.
