Validation through competition

Around 2 weeks ago I launched oku.io, a platform where you can organize all your favorite feeds and content sources in one clean, distraction-free board. Now, I built it as a scrappy tool to solve my own problem at first, didn't really make any market research. After talking to some friends, I decided to turn it into a real product and release it for people to use.

I got decent feedback in the first few days, a few paying users as well, which were nice signals for such a new product that's also not selling anything 'click-baity' (pass me the word) like make money schemes or 10x your revenue with this tool type of things.

Then something happened in the last few days that I really didn't expect. Flipboard launched Surf, and Bluesky announced Attie, both products that live in a very similar space (custom feeds, cleaner reading experience, etc.) of Oku.

A few years ago I would've felt crushed and possibly blaimed my usually unlucky timing (both those products have been in the works for a while, but I didn't know because, again, I didn't do any market research), but after being in this space for a while, it actually felt great to see large companies building to tackle the same problem. It helped me push away the fear that it was too-niche of a product, and motivated me to keep building.