I was buying groceries one afternoon when a message came in from Joe: got time to talk about the product?
Along with it he forwarded links to a handful of products similar to Hypatia.
- Huanjue Fanyi (幻觉翻译)hjfy.toptranslates arXiv papers from their LaTeX source, so the translation keeps the original layout and formulas; it can also translate uploaded PDFs.
- Yiyi (一译)yiyibooks.cna translation platform for papers and documents, with the original and the translation side by side and a discussion community.
- alphaXivalphaxiv.orga research discovery platform that helps you pick out papers worth reading, gives answers grounded in the papers themselves, and connects papers, researchers and institutions.
- Agenterogithub.coman open-source, local workbench for managing and reading literature that plugs into your own AI agent and works with the Zotero ecosystem.
I felt a little weary. I hate competitive analysis.
I have my reasons. This market is big enough for an indie developer; doing my own work well is enough. There’s no real need to watch what everyone else is doing. What I need to do is solve the problems of the people around me, and leave competitors out of my head.
Joe said other people surely had things worth learning from.
I said this market is too small: the best people, the ones most worth learning from, are certainly somewhere else. If I want to learn, I should learn from products that have been far more successful.
We argued for a long time. I couldn’t say why I was so set against competitive analysis and industry research. And that may not be the worst of it. The worst is that I couldn’t say how much of my aversion came from fear: fear that others were doing better, fear that what I was making was worthless.
Since AI arrived, I’ve slowly come to realize that the coding skill I spent so long building doesn’t seem to matter that much anymore.
I’m a professional programmer, and I haven’t read code in a long time. I think AI’s effect on programmer productivity is enormous, maybe tens of times over at the very least. A surge in supply of that size will very likely throw supply and demand badly out of balance.
On the other hand, as someone restless with “lots of ideas” who has always wanted to start a company, I’ve realized my background isn’t very convincing. I’m not a Stanford or MIT dropout, I’m not an executive at a big Chinese tech company, and I’m hardly going to love motorcycles so much that I chase a reporter down the road on one1.
To sum it up, I have three things missing: no background, no track record, no conviction or courage.
I had finally found a product I wanted to build, finally shrunk myself into a place where I don’t have to keep proving myself to people who don’t believe in me, finally convinced myself that sticking with it would make things better. At a moment like that, I really didn’t want to see that others had long been doing what I’m doing, and doing it better.
Fine. Deep down I do know: my resistance to competitive analysis probably still comes from fear.
On that call with Joe, I got a little emotional.
Joe is a few years older than me. We met while working at MarginNote, and he has been something like a big brother to me. Back then I was a senior in high school and he was a senior in college; he taught me, hands-on, how to edit video.
On the call, he walked me through the products he had collected one by one, pointing out what each did well. I still wasn’t convinced.
Then Joe asked me: “Would you dare send your users a link to your product along with links to all of these?”
I froze for a second, then felt a jolt of excitement: “You know what? I really would.”
In middle school and high school I was obsessed with productivity software. I studied every detail of every product, and I could lie in bed with my eyes closed, on the phone with a friend, and tell them exactly how to work the menus. That feeling has grown a little unfamiliar. I started asking myself where that version of me had gone: the one with no ego, who lost himself in learning from others.
I decided to use this moment to write a series of posts sorting through the products that have inspired Hypatia over the years, and to learn what my peers are doing and what they do well.
01Footnotes
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Zhang Xue is the founder of ZXMOTO (张雪机车). In 2006, as a 19-year-old apprentice at a motorcycle repair shop, he rode through the rain after a TV news crew’s van for more than a hundred kilometers, hoping a racing team would notice him. In 2026, ZXMOTO’s bikes won at the Portugal round of the World Superbike Championship (WSBK). ↩