June 8, 2026
First place or first mistake?
Doing Something That's Never Been Done Before
Founder says "be first" — commenters say "cool, but can you actually sell it?"
TLDR: The article argues that the best way to do something truly new is to choose work that is obscure, difficult, and takes many steps. Commenters weren’t fully sold: many said being first matters less than making something useful, sellable, and well-executed.
A startup thinker dropped a bold little manifesto: if you want to make something nobody has ever done before, pick the stuff everyone else avoids — make it obscure, hard, slow, and full of surprises that only appear after you’ve already started. In other words: if it’s confusing, exhausting, and buried in a niche corner of the world, congratulations, you might actually be first.
But the comments? Instant reality check. One crowd basically said, “Being first is cute, but being useful is what pays the bills.” That became the thread’s big drama: is originality the goal, or is this just a romantic way of describing a product no one asked for? One commenter bluntly argued it’s not really about doing something never done before at all — it’s about building something you can actually sell in a world full of rivals, legal headaches, and copycats. Ouch.
Others piled on with the classic startup cold shower: most good ideas are obvious, and the real battle is execution, especially when some bigger, richer company may already be building the same thing in secret. Meanwhile, one longtime builder brought receipts, sharing his own 14-year journey turning an oddball side project into SocketCluster, which gave the thread a scrappy underdog vibe.
And then came the artsy twist: maybe the real fun isn’t inventing something brand new at all, but reviving forgotten ideas and giving them your own flavor. Translation: the comments turned this from “how to be original” into a messy, funny debate about ego, value, and whether being first even matters.
Key Points
- •The article examines how to maximize the chances of doing a project that no one else has done before.
- •It identifies time required for a project as a factor that reduces how many people will start or finish it.
- •It identifies difficulty and number of steps as factors that make completion by others less likely.
- •It argues that obscure ideas are less likely to have already been discovered or executed.
- •It says projects with progressive dependency, where later steps are only revealed after earlier ones are completed, further increase the likelihood of originality.