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Having 170 competitors in not an obstacle
- tatsuhirosatou 6y agoHow do you plan on overcoming the marketing/word of mouth barrier? People often choose products based on what their friends are using and what they see people online mentioning. How can you get in front of people first without spending tons of cash on marketing and paid ads?
- Akcium 6y agoI wouldn't agree that people choose products based on what their friends are using. At least for me it doesn't work. While the second part is true, I agree. It's really hard to overcome existing players, on the other hand there are some advantages: existing players are kind of slow in terms of changing (adding new features) and in terms of support. Among these 170 alternatives, more than half of them were built in 2010 I guess, and they do not evolve. Regarding paid ads. This year I was watching how other guys do with their side projects and I literally haven't seen anyone who tried paid ads. They did SEO though, but not google ads or something like that. Because they are good at reaching the right audience in the right place, I guess.
- askjdlkasdjsd 6y agoAgain, how do YOU plan on overcoming the marketing/word of mouth barrier?
- takezo 6y agoReminds me of DHH from Startup School 08. The idea of an Mom & Pop store on the internet:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY Good luck with Pingr :)
- Akcium 6y agoNever heard about mom-and-pop store, but now I get what you mean. My family literally has one, mom-and-pop store of radio receivers :) Thank you!
- drchiu 6y agoFrom a purchaser’s perspective, I really do welcome more choices most of the time. Reasons: - more likely I’ll find the product that fits my budget and needs - ability to switch out of an unfavourable technology stack that no longer works for me - competition helps encourage the vendors to improve their products and fix bugs
- Akcium 6y agoIndeed, while monopoly prevents from improvement/bug fixes I think
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoMaybe consider the paradox of choice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
- ramshanker 6y agoAs a synonym, every time I had an APP idea, I search the play store and App Store and there are at least 10 variants. Discarded. After this happened couple of times, I have had enough. Finally decided to go anyway.
- Akcium 6y agoYep, you should try anyway because if you dig deeper, you'll still find dozens or hundreds of more or less similar apps. What can you do? Make them better, or at least try =)
- mromanuk 6y agoA possible better way than better, is being different :) When you try to make a better product, you are automatically comparing yourself to other products. Instead, when you try to be different you are creating your own niche and your own rules. Yor product will not be compared against others. At least if you fail, you will be original and not another copy-cat.
- yboris 6y agoI decided to create an app to browse and search through videos on your computer. There are many out there, but none had the specific set of features (and visual appeal) that I wanted. I now sell about 100 copies per month for about $500 income per month. I give $350 to charity for every 100 copies, but that's a personal decision. Building it has been a great learning experience. Interacting with customers has been a very rewarding experience (so many people love it). Video Hub App - https://videohubapp.com/en/ https://videohubapp.com/en/ and Open Source on GitHub - https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
- ackbar03 6y agoKudos to you, that's awesome, especially giving most of it to charity. How did you reach your customers? At 5 dollars per sale, that's around 100 customers per month for something that seems relatively non-essential
- saviorand 6y agoOftentimes it makes more sense to think of the presence of competitors as just another means of validation -- confirming that someone needs this. If there's no need, there won't be anyone on the market
- Akcium 6y agoThis is exact statement I made in the article: if there is a competition, that means the idea is already validated for you. So there is at least some demand
- atharahmed 6y agoI think a lot of times in maker communities building what already exists is not seen as good which I don't get. Having a few competitors shows that there is market for what you are doing and you do not have to be same as others you just have to be better like better feature, UI, support maybe.
- Akcium 6y agoIndeed!
- hermitcrab 6y agoEven the most obscure ideas have plenty of competitors (I know I write table planning software for events). If you come up with something that has no competitors, either: -you didn't look hard enough -you are a genius who spotted an untapped demand (very unlikely) -no-one wants it (very likely) Also, remember that the main competitor to a lot of software is Excel and post-it notes. That said, the more competitors the harder it is to get noticed. Ideally pick something where you have got a reasonable chance of getting on page 1 or 2 of Google.
- Akcium 6y agoAgree, you should keep balance here. Between something very competitive and something non-competitive at all.
- hermitcrab 6y agoBTW Don't clone a successful product. Have some respect for yourself and for others. It rarely works anyway (struggling to think of a single case where it has).
- k__ 6y agoYes, what are all those people copying Ferdinand Verbiest thinking...
- nadermx 6y agovk.com?
- Akcium 6y agoI guess we should not clone a product, but its okay to clone the idea. I used vk.com a lot in the past and in terms of UI it was much more convenient for me than Facebook. Same ideas, different implementations.
- hermitcrab 6y agoComing up with a different way to solve the same problem or using ideas from other products is cool. Nothing is truly original. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, after all. I'm talking about people who just rip-off someone else's design with adding anything original.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoWatch this talk, "Competition is for losers" (by Peter Thiel) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k It's a clickbaity title but it's a serious talk.
- Akcium 6y agoWill do, thanks for sharing!
- jv22222 6y agoI discuss this pretty deeply in my indie founder bootcamp but the main point is, if your revenue goals are something like $20k/month (and not to build a unicorn) then one of the lowest risk decisions is to try to get a very tiny percentage of a “proven” very large market. The reason is that getting a few hundred or a few thousand customers in a proven market with millions of customers is a very achievable goal over a few years. No need to compete on price, just compete on great customer service and support. Be someone that your customers know and like and love dealing with. And of course you do need to make a great product and find a marketing channel(s) to reach that small segment of customers.
- Akcium 6y agoInterestingly I changed my pricing quite a lot, because many people were complaining that competitors are cheaper and it's kind of hard to hide this fact. But still I got some ideas which I'm going to implement, and hopefully increase my value. For me, $20k/month is surreal. But for someone it's nothing.
- jv22222 6y agoThat probably means that you need to rethink the top of the funnel. If your main marketing efforts have been to scrappy student startups etc then price will be a big deal for them, but if you can shift to marketing to small business that do have an income and present Yourself as very easy to deal with and talk to then you might be able to shift the dynamic. Again, in the bootcamp, but there are many different types of buyers and you just have to work out how to reach the ones that align with your goals.
- xwdv 6y ago$20k/month is really a paltry amount of revenue for a business. If your expenses are like $5k a month and your getting maybe $180k a year in profit before taxes this is really more like a job than a business. A business making revenue of $20k a month must be a very small idea, for example a service that pings some servers and alerts customers of downtime or maybe some kind of file storage. Conceivably that means you can quickly pump out a lot of similar sized ideas and perhaps get multiple revenue streams going, each averaging $20k a month or so. Now you can afford to hire talent.
- heipei 6y agoEventually it becomes an obstacle to the customer who has to pick between all of these competitors. But seriously, uptime / API monitoring with dashboards is a space I spent way too much time researching to find the thing that matches my requirements. If you can stand out via those features I absolutely needed I would have stopped my search almost instantly. pingr is an example of a tool which looks like the bare minimum (good if they can make it work), so I wouldn't have been able to even consider them.
- phkahler 6y agoAnother thing to consider is that there is always turnover in a market. Even if there are always 170 competitors you can be certain that each year some of them drop out and new ones appear. Guess what the new ones did. They made the effort. You may fail if you try, but you will fail if you don't. Someone is going to replace one of the existing players, why not you?
- cpeterso 6y agoA market without competitors might not have any customers either. In a crowded market, you might be able to carve a profitable, specialized niche.
- Technically 6y agoTl;dr gambling and narcissism occasionally pay off.
- k__ 6y agoMaybe, new technology makes things much cheaper, but competitors are locked into some older tech can can't follow fast enough. It's always worth a try.
- felix12777 6y agoCompetition is a good thing. Proven market, customers are ready to switch, so many research you can reuse.
- mariopt 6y agoI would like to ask the author about pricing: If I create 20 monitors at a rate of 10 minutes I only pay $1.00 + $1.04 / mo How do you create a sustainable product that you can realistic maintain when you've to pay taxes, hosting, etc. at this price?
- zapt02 6y agoThis pricing is actually not that far-fetched. Consider that the competitor UptimeRobot offer 50 monitors at 5 minutes interval for free. You can lease servers very cheaply nowadays, uptime monitoring is not resource-intensive and is an easily distributed workload. The most expensive part of the operation is likely to store the monitor results in a database.
- jvanderbot 6y ago> Everyone knows that idea worth nothing. Implementation does. That's Borat-level pep talk.
- victorronin 6y agoFor some reason, I thought about survivor bias. You are right that not all successful business started with an original idea. You are right that not all of them required significant upfront investment, and you are right that there are great newcomers who find a niche in an established market. There is only one thing you are missing. How many businesses like that have failed. Is it 1%, 10%, 50%, 90% or 99%? I would guess that it's somewhere upward of 90%. BTW. And you won't even hear about failed companies because these 170 competitors are survivors. Having capital increases your chances of being able to experiment and find market fit. Having limited competition increases your chances of being noticed. Having a fresh (doesn't have original) idea helps you laser-focused on what you are trying to solve. BTW. I am not trying to discourage you from trying. However, if you want to try, I recommend doing this with your eyes open.