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[ARTICLE · art-22086] src=news.ycombinator.com pub= topic=ai-startups verified=true sentiment=· neutral

My competitors have flawed products but I can't get traction

A two-person team built Cork, an app that extracts restaurant and event information from Instagram Reels and TikTok videos and saves it to a map and calendar, outperforming funded competitors on popular creator content. The founder is struggling to gain traction despite the app's superior performance, questioning why larger teams with more resources fail to solve the same problem.

read1 min publishedJun 5, 2026

Problem: I constantly save Instagram Reels/TikToks about restaurants, events, pop-ups, and things to do, but I always forget about them because they get buried in my saves.

Solution: I built Cork. You can send a Reel or Tiktok directly to Cork without even needing to leave the app, and Cork will automatically extract the info in the reel and save it in a map + calendar.

However, I've been finding it hard to get traction while my competitors have gotten traction/funding. I strongly believe my app outperforms all known competitors (their apps fail on reels of popular creators while mine succeeds).

I'm not here for pity or to advertise, but I'm curious why people ship products that don't work for a pretty significant number of inputs when the teams are big enough (employees + funding) to pretty easily solve the problem in a cheap way (as I've done) or at least have a temporary high-performing solution with GPT.

TL;DR: imo my app outperforms competitors in raw performance. why is a team with manpower and funding failing to do something a 2 person team did in a month?

Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406829](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406829)

Points: 2

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