How does it feel to compete directly against Justin Kan?
TL;DR; I’m Stoked!
Truth be told, my heart did sink a little bit when I first saw Whale on Product Hunt on Monday morning.
I downloaded the Whale app immediately and started playing around with it. At first glance, Whale is so similar to YAM! And as I played with the app a bit more over the course of the day, I have to conclude that it’s a very well-designed app too. And, they have some pretty awesome folks (especially from the startup world) featured on the app as well!
But by the end of Monday, I actually thought that this is, on the whole, a great development for us.
Firstly, while there are a fair bit of similarities, there’re also some crucial differences between the 2 apps (for another post after our official launch).
Furthermore, having someone like Justin Kan (whom I respect a great deal and learn a lot from his snapchat Q&A) start something similar in our space is actually a fairly solid validation on the idea. At the very least, TechCrunch “instantly” got back to us on Monday after I tried to court them for weeks to write about us.
And then it dawned on me that at this point, 99% of the world probably don’t give a damn about Whale, and 100% of the world definitely don’t give a damn about YAM. My job is to first get that 0.1% of the world to care about YAM and grow from there.
The truth is, both products will evolve over time. It’s hard to tell whether our product roadmap will continue to overlap, but I’m very certain that if we fail, it won’t be because of Whale, but rather we didn’t build something that people want on a regular basis.
So I went to bed that Monday night, smiling to myself. This is gonna be such a fun & crazy ride! Am absolutely stoked!
If you’re interested, do give YAM a try (App Store link here)!
