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You've already identified some of your competitors, you should go in to more detail and try to answer: * What features are common among my competitors? * What
by wcerfgba 5y ago
You've already identified some of your competitors, you should go in to more detail and try to answer:
* What features are common among my competitors?
* What features are unique?
* Who are target customers and users? Is there any overlap, or do some competitors target unique market segments?
This last question ties in to a discussion I was having with a friend recently. In B2B sales, your customers are businesses, but your users are people in those businesses with certain roles and responsibilities. Understanding the difference is key, because you will often need to develop your sales and marketing strategies based on the business/customer profile, but your UX will depend on the needs of the users within those businesses.
In my opinion you are more likely to be successful if you can get an initial foothold in a market by identifying a specific target of customers and users, solving their use case very well, developing a moat, and then growing out from that foothold to provide a wider set of options. Web scraping is just a tool. You need to find businesses who can gain value from scraping or from scraped data. Are there businesses who, for whatever reason, would not be able to adopt one of your competitors' products, or would find that adoption difficult? Maybe you could specialise in scraping a particular kind of data, or providing a full-stack solution for companies with limited in-house technical expertise (like some kind of consulting, you hop on a call with the client, they tell you what they want to scrape, and you set up a hosted solution which provides a SQL or Excel interface to the data).
In short, successful product development is all about understanding customer and user pain and needs. If you can find pains or needs which are a common theme for a particular demographic of companies and roles, you can work with those people to understand their problems and make a product which is very valuable to them.
- fforflo 5y agoThanks a lot for your comment. You're exactly right on the tricky relationship between developers as internal ambassadors to businesses - customers. I think it somehow applies to almost any developer-facing tool. Your recommendation to focus on a specific vertical at first makes sense too. Helps prioritising the backlog as well.