Joel Liu's Library tagged Launch → View Popular, Search in Google

That's one of the canonical dumb investor questions. We try not to ask those. Google could blow most startups out of the water if they chose to focus on building exactly the same thing. What protects startups is that in practice big competitors can only focus on a limited number of things at once.
User indifference is a much, much greater danger for startups than competitors, big or small. So we advise startups to focus on that. What's going to kill you is the Back button, not Google.

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We were determined to take part in Y Combinator, so we spent weeks crafting our entry and polishing Rapportive. At the start of March, we were finally ready. We held our breath and clicked "Submit". We looked at each other, relaxed, and slowly started to breathe again. A few hours passed uneventfully. We were in no way prepared for what happened next.

Somehow, the press had found us. TheNextWeb ran the first piece. ReadWriteWeb picked it up after that. Then Lifehacker. Then WebWorkerDaily. We had headlines like: "Stop What You Are Doing & Install This Plug-In." Our twitter account was aflame with thousands of mentions in just a few hours. We had accidentally launched.