Ever see the Seinfeld reunion show on Curb Your Enthusiasm? George Costanza married a woman named Amanda and made a fortune devising an iPhone application called the iToilet that directed the user to the nearest decent public toilet anywhere in the world. Alas, Amanda left George, and then George lost his fortune in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and was forced to moved in with Jerry.

You may be among the many who have had an app idea that potentially would garner millions, only to have the sinking feeling of regret when you discover a similar idea has already hit the market. How hard or easy is it to put your app idea out there in the real world? The story is never as simple as paying a team of developers over several months to build your app and waiting for the millions to come in. Otherwise, you would see a lot of developers gathering together in small groups, creating apps, and making millions by themselves — why would they need you?

The Internet is always changing and evolving. If you think you have a good idea for a website or app, you may find yourself discouraged when you discover through an online search that there may be someone somewhere developing it already.

How Do We Start?

To be honest, the first mistake folks often make is to focus so much on the product, but product is nothing without a good business plan. There are so many products that nobody knows about, and even a product that you might think is a gold mine might not pan out as such. You simply can’t trust your gut . . . well, you can try, but success from that is generally just a lucky strike. The best thing you can do is to collect data from the real world and base your decisions on your research.

Understand the Real Capital

Even if your product is a complex revolutionary tool, what will prevent Google from putting their best engineers to copy it? There are many companies with plenty of resources that can copy your product (or even do it better!) so, sorry to say, your product might be meaningless without a good userbase. Let’s take WhatsApp as an example: it made an app that had a lot of money behind it yet it’s been free to download and use. When it got to the point where everyone with a smartphone had been using WhatsApp, Facebook decided to swoop down and buy the company. Are you curious why? (That’s probably a topic for another conversation…) Similarly, what does Google gain from users for giving them free email service? What does Facebook get from giving you a social media platform for free?

The important thing to understand is how companies struggle to acquire users, as that can be quite expensive. YouTube released YouTube Music to compete with Spotify and Apple Music; Amazon Prime Video is competing with Netflix. Anyone with enough resources can introduce a streaming service but, to be honest, I’m curious how many people actually use something like YouTube Music — after all, Microsoft tried to conquer the mobile market for 10 years until it surrendered to Apple and Google by calling Windows 10 Mobile EOL in January 2020.

User Segment

Now that we understand users should be your initial focus, we then need to identify the user segment. For example, people using Instagram and businesses using G Suite are completely different, so the strategies to acquire them will be different as well. Put on your marketing thinking cap and you’ll always remember that good market research knows its potential customers.

Being Able to Pivot

Some businesses begin in one form, then evolve into another. Why? They collect data from users and see how you use their products. None care about you as an individual. Companies simply want to sell more, so they apply analytics and even more invasive ways of identifying their users and how the users behave so they can have a more successful business. It’s no secret that people use YouTube to listen to music for free (wink wink) and, of course, YouTube will try to capitalize on the info it gains from you.

Product Life Cycle

This is a very important consideration. An Internet company is not like a pen manufacturer, which can get away with designing a writing instrument and mass-producing it. Rather, the Internet demands that you adapt, evolve, and pivot. You have to give support to the users because if your plan is to have a successful company, you will need people working on every single aspect of your business. It’s common to see startups paying third-party people just to build something and then expecting to garner profits. However, startups will get to the point where they need to change something, so they will have to bring on a new team (because the old team is probably working on something else), which ends up costing (read: losing) money with ramp-ups. They often don’t receive the results they had anticipated, and we end up with yet another startup who invested a lot of money in the beginning and then perished.

The bottom line is to not get discouraged on starting your own business — simply manage expectations, as the game keeps changing and the world gets more complicated every single day, Steve Jobs once said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do”, so try to listen as many voices as you can before you start your new journey and think about building a company instead of building a product.

As always, thank you for reading!

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The iToilet was MY idea! I shall make MILLIONS! was originally published in DevBorn on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.