It generally takes 20-30 hours to dig up all of the players in a space, which seems like a long time to spend looking. But, compared to spending 6-12 months building a product, 20-30 hours now isn't bad at all. Not putting in the hard yards looking is being blissfully ignorant... a thorough market analysis is not to be discouraging: it's a way to become an expert in a space and learn vicariously through competition.I did not want to be 'blissfully ignorant.' I, too, wanted to 'learn vicariously.' And the more TechM incubated in my mind these last several months (as I waited until I settled into my first job, moved to a new city, bought a new laptop, etc.), the more confident I became in this idea's ability to solve a truly unsolved and important problem. I got legitimately excited, energized.
After tonight, now more than ever, it seems to me that this space is indeed an important problem.
However, it has already been solved, at least in the manner with which TechM aimed (in my wildest, most polished fantasies) to solve it.
So, enter Wavii.
As I quickly texted a friend tonight while trying to stifle my growing disappointment, Wavii is "literally everything techm could have aspired to be, and then some."
The funny thing is, I've known about Wavii for over 7 months now. I've known about Wavii since May 11, 2013, to be exact, when I began my second wave of preliminary market research. It didn't concern me too much back then though. It was certainly the most concerning existing product that I had found, but it still didn't worry me. TechM felt different enough.
But TechM has been evolving in my mind, as evidenced by its Trello board. And nowadays, what I feel would be an interesting, worthwhile problem to solve turns out to have its solution in this startup that was acquired by Google in April 2013. (So close, so far away.)
...
The bright side of all of this is that I am not defeated. I recently read a treatise by Rolf Dobelli proposing that people should "Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet." While I do not agree with everything Dobelli argues for and against in his article, especially the idea that any attempt to keep up with daily news is pointless and futile, it gave me pause about my own goals for TechM.
After reading Dobelli, I tried to shift the target a bit so that TechM could hopefully avoid being irrelevant, disrupting, wasteful, limiting, 'toxic,' etc. (i.e., "TechM is going to be so smart and efficient that it will only deliver choice tidbits at a suitable pace not merely dictated by the 24-hour/daily news cycle!"). I started thinking about Longform, a curated site of 2,000-words-or-more articles that I only recently discovered, and how I could ditch puff pieces altogether in favor of recommending articles of significant length (and, it hopes to follow, significant matter). I started thinking about how I could become more prejudiced with the trending topics displayed- how I could use a topic's historical performance to better denote importance. But this vision majorly butt heads with the 'alternate interface' path I had also been exploring in my mind. So maybe I was making excuses, maybe I was desperately flailing with A BIG IDEA that was slowly sinking underneath Dobelli's newfound ideological heft. And maybe Wavii was the final weight. (Or maybe I'm giving up too soon?)
All of this is to say, if the core idea of TechM is fading as quickly as it appears to be right now, a new incarnation of something may already be on the rise. Now to harness it, define it. Move on with the lessons learned here.
How to: focus on deep instead of broad thinking, insights over factoids, quality over quantity. Continue to combat heavy and time-wasting news consumption, but by adding meaningful words to be read instead of removing meaningless words.
