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Another reason why you have no competition: there is no market. Sometimes we delude ourselves that we found a niche no one has addressed when in fact there is

Another reason why you have no competition: there is no market. Sometimes we delude ourselves that we found a niche no one has addressed when in fact there is no niche at all. This can be due to poor research, but as stupid as it sounds, it happens. It happened to me, at least. I spent a lot of time building a product on zone diet just believing that because there were a lot of people following it and people buying products, there existed also a market of people willing to plan their diet with a computer program. It was my first software and I was very naive. But when I released it I realized that it was not possible to reach this market: there were no blogs about it and other marketing strategies were still unable to reach a significant number of customers. People simply did not bother about a "problem" that was just in my (and my friend's) mind. The customer where unreachable because the market was non existent. So, if you find yourself thinking that you have no competition, go back asking the other question: is there a market for this?

reitzensteinm 16y ago
Wow, that brings back painful memories. In high school I built a program called the B3D Tweak Utility, an editor for the Blitz3D file format (a RAD game tool). I sold maybe 30 or so copies for $20. Encouraged that I could sell something online and see a return, I followed it up a crazy GUI build tool with Python scripting that supported a ton of extensions for eg building the demo and full versions of a product up to the install file. Completely scratching my own itch, and it took a few months of work. I got zero sales. I posted on my usual dev forums with about two replies. The only email I ever got about it was asking whether I was planning a Mac version, which he'd absolutely need before he'd consider using it. Thinking now about how much money I could make if I worked that hard on something for 2 months today makes me ill... but I'm not sure there are any short cuts around making those painful mistakes in the beginning. Experiencing the bottom (i.e. investing time with 0 return) has made me laser focused on market fit before I start any product today.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  Similar experiences here in the past as well. Plus some painful learning experiences with advertising. Had one product I spent several hundred dollars on Google advertising. Product had zero sales. Then later I released a different product. Spent zero on advertising -- just some self-promotion, social media presence, tweets, and some free entries submitted on niche-relevant sites --- and of course, it made hundreds of dollars in sales! Totally counter-intuitive to my then-arguably-naive thinking. But useful learning experience.
JacobAldridge 16y ago
So very true. A gap in the market != a market in the gap.

reitzensteinm 16y ago

Wow, that brings back painful memories. In high school I built a program called the B3D Tweak Utility, an editor for the Blitz3D file format (a RAD game tool). I sold maybe 30 or so copies for $20. Encouraged that I could sell something online and see a return, I followed it up a crazy GUI build tool with Python scripting that supported a ton of extensions for eg building the demo and full versions of a product up to the install file. Completely scratching my own itch, and it took a few months of work. I got zero sales. I posted on my usual dev forums with about two replies. The only email I ever got about it was asking whether I was planning a Mac version, which he'd absolutely need before he'd consider using it. Thinking now about how much money I could make if I worked that hard on something for 2 months today makes me ill... but I'm not sure there are any short cuts around making those painful mistakes in the beginning. Experiencing the bottom (i.e. investing time with 0 return) has made me laser focused on market fit before I start any product today.

mkramlich 16y ago
Similar experiences here in the past as well. Plus some painful learning experiences with advertising. Had one product I spent several hundred dollars on Google advertising. Product had zero sales. Then later I released a different product. Spent zero on advertising -- just some self-promotion, social media presence, tweets, and some free entries submitted on niche-relevant sites --- and of course, it made hundreds of dollars in sales! Totally counter-intuitive to my then-arguably-naive thinking. But useful learning experience.

JacobAldridge 16y ago

So very true. A gap in the market != a market in the gap.