Will Google Build Your Product?
When Google releases a product identical to yours
For the last six months, my development team and I have been doggedly working on a new cloud-hosted service that would allow software engineers to build real-time user interfaces. We released our beta version to an enthusiastic test audience last spring and officially launch our product, Rapid, during our hackathon in San Francisco this past July.
We started getting traction and saw that developers are really finding Rapid useful. Our high lasted until last week. Tuesday morning. G-Day.
It was a standard Tuesday, I got to the office and opened Android Headlines, just like every other day. Scrolling through the headlines, I stopped on one particularly enticing bit of flash news: Google was launching a new product for developers — Cloud Firestore. Interesting. As I read through the article, it quickly became obvious that Google launched a product that is identical Rapid. I felt like I was reading a verbatim description of my own product that launched three months earlier.
We worked with Google’s Firebase on many of our previous projects. It’s a smooth platform, but we felt it was missing some important elements that didn’t allow us to easily scale our apps, like rich queries and more intuitive data structuring, which is why we decided to build Rapid.
I called my team together for an emergency meeting. At first, the mood in the room was sober and far from enthusiastic. We knew we didn’t have the resources to compete with Google. However as we discussed the situation in great detail we became increasingly optimistic and as weird as it sounds, excited.
Why? Simple: the fact that Google launched a product that is identical to ours gave us the ultimate validation that what we were doing was product with a huge market potential. This gave us the confidence that we’re able to build a product that people want and need. If that wasn’t the case, then Google wouldn’t have wasted time developing its own version. Such a validation is extremely important for our confidence moving forward.
Tuesday’s news also proved to me that my team is capable of building a technologically complex product that’s on par with something coming out of Googleplex. And this realization is incredibly empowering. Google may have employed hundreds of engineers to build its Cloud Firestore. We built the same product with a team of seven and in less than a year!
No doubt we’re facing some challenging times. I myself am still recovering from what came so unexpected. But I know that I work with an amazing group of engineers. Some of the best talents in the world, in my opinion. It’s time to start embracing the startup life. Pick yourself up from the floor and keep on innovating. We sure aren’t giving up.
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Here’s my last post: These Startups Get Funded, These Don’t — a lesson I’ve learned
