Worst-Case Scenario

It’s 6:40pm on Thursday, 27th August.

I’ve taken a break from frantically fixing bugs with my app. While right now it doesn’t seem of high importance to sit down and write out a blog post, I think in the future I may appreciate that I captured my in-the-moment thoughts, as this current situation plays out.

Two hours ago, I left the office, and received a much-dreaded message from a friend. It’s worst-case scenario. I struggle to think of anything that could be more impactful to a startup, building a product.

The news was something I’ve always worried about as a possibility, and whenever I see a link come through from a friend, my first panicked thought is that this might be it. Well, this was it. The link had come. A link to a TechCrunch article introducing the first ever competitor to my new product. My new product which isn’t done yet. And this competitor, now released on the App Store. Devastating. I headed back to the office, looked at the information available, read the review. And this was all a bit worse than I thought.

Let me briefly interject to tell you what my app is. TwIM is IM for Twitter. It’s a messaging app, powered by Twitter DMs. It’s a Twitter app that doesn’t support Timeline, Mentions, Trends, anything like that. It’s everything that’s described of my new competitor, in the TechCrunch article now sitting in front of me. The tagline on the article is the summation of my own app’s appeal. Lines I had written almost word-for-word in my own notes before.

But my new competitor isn’t just another app with the same concept. This is where it gets worse. A lot of the smaller ideas, I’d thought were strokes of cleverness in my own app — ways to get around the limitations of the API we both had to use, and introduce features otherwise not possible. This competitor had those things too.

I’m devastated right now. Of course, my friends are reminding me that first doesn’t necessarily mean the winner, but this isn’t good. Being first, with a unique, new idea, is a massive strength, a one I planned to use. Look at what this app can do — isn’t it neat? Now that’s gone, and when my app is introduced, if it makes it to those higher-profile tech sites, my worry is it’ll be listed under this is the same thing as that other app we all know about.

Mostly I’m just drained of all energy. I’m not angry. I’m not upset. I just feel defeated. I tried to get my app done in good time. I tried to ensure it would be the first on the market, and I’ve now failed at that. This other app has taken the first-come glory, and with it, brought a lot of the nice surprises I hoped people would enjoy in my own app.

So, forcing myself to think positively now. It’s true that this competitor doesn’t quite have everything that my own app does. Their message-input mechanism is pretty standard, and it seems mostly that their app is based on Facebook Messenger. It mimics that interface quite heavily — not to it’s discredit, because it looks well-made and I don’t want to insult the other developer on his work. But that is different from my approach, which attempts to be it’s own unique messaging experience. Rather than implementing a feature like stickers, my app goes a slightly different route, and introduces a new concept that ties in more with existing emojis, for example.

There might be silver linings, but to clarify, this isn’t a good situation.

Fuck.

Now back to work.