<story><title>Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)</title><url>https://slackhq.com/screen-sharing-in-slack-made-interactive-cf8816efaa01</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kjksf</author><text>People are so desperate to find viable business ideas. We discuss to death MVPs, fake landing pages, articles describing how to find and validate ideas and find first customers.&lt;p&gt;Yet, no one notices when business opportunity stares them in the face.&lt;p&gt;Go and duplicate screenhero. It&amp;#x27;s not that hard (Screenhero was written by 4 devs and 1 designer). They did YC in winter 2013 and got acquired by Slack in Jan 20015, so it&amp;#x27;s less than 2 years.&lt;p&gt;You have a validated product that many people love and are willing to pay for and enough of a &amp;quot;outside of Slack&amp;quot; market to sustain a small company.&lt;p&gt;On launch you&amp;#x27;ll get free PR just by announcing &amp;quot;Screenhero alternative&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;And if you do a good job, it&amp;#x27;s likely that Atlassian (or some other Slack competitor) will want to acquire you for a tidy sum.&lt;p&gt;Lot&amp;#x27;s of the hard code has been written for you (libraries for stun firewall traversal, vp8 for the video codec). You need to write a simple backend for matching people and 2 desktop apps (mac and windows).&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not easy but it&amp;#x27;s also not a problem that requires breaking new ground, just solid engineering.&lt;p&gt;What we get instead are pleas to Slack to not kill stand-alone Screenhero and bemoaning that someone didn&amp;#x27;t write OSS (aka free) clone.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zpr</author><text>You mean you could make a YouTube clone in a weekend? It&amp;#x27;s easy to fall into this way of thinking. But hey, maybe you will build the next Screenhero, or TeamViewer. Or maybe you&amp;#x27;ll end up as one of the thousands of other versions of this nobody has ever heard of. The idea is usually not the hard part.</text></comment>
<story><title>Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)</title><url>https://slackhq.com/screen-sharing-in-slack-made-interactive-cf8816efaa01</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kjksf</author><text>People are so desperate to find viable business ideas. We discuss to death MVPs, fake landing pages, articles describing how to find and validate ideas and find first customers.&lt;p&gt;Yet, no one notices when business opportunity stares them in the face.&lt;p&gt;Go and duplicate screenhero. It&amp;#x27;s not that hard (Screenhero was written by 4 devs and 1 designer). They did YC in winter 2013 and got acquired by Slack in Jan 20015, so it&amp;#x27;s less than 2 years.&lt;p&gt;You have a validated product that many people love and are willing to pay for and enough of a &amp;quot;outside of Slack&amp;quot; market to sustain a small company.&lt;p&gt;On launch you&amp;#x27;ll get free PR just by announcing &amp;quot;Screenhero alternative&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;And if you do a good job, it&amp;#x27;s likely that Atlassian (or some other Slack competitor) will want to acquire you for a tidy sum.&lt;p&gt;Lot&amp;#x27;s of the hard code has been written for you (libraries for stun firewall traversal, vp8 for the video codec). You need to write a simple backend for matching people and 2 desktop apps (mac and windows).&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not easy but it&amp;#x27;s also not a problem that requires breaking new ground, just solid engineering.&lt;p&gt;What we get instead are pleas to Slack to not kill stand-alone Screenhero and bemoaning that someone didn&amp;#x27;t write OSS (aka free) clone.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tlogan</author><text>Sadly this is not true. There are so many excellent applications and SaaS - but they die very fast.&lt;p&gt;If the company which builds an excellent solution does not get acquired they will learn the meaning of the word &amp;quot;hell on earth&amp;quot;: customer acquisition baby. Customer acquisition is not easy.&lt;p&gt;Of course, customer acquisition is easier if your product does not suck - but not so much.</text></comment>