Follow-up of HN's response to my post
blog.shopyist.com
blog.shopyist.com
Some people are suggesting you do Market Research to find this, others are suggesting that you find a narrow niche to begin with and customize to fit their needs, others are suggesting you outline the features. But at the end of the day, they all reduce to the same thing: find a differentiator you can use as a UVP.
But then this begs the question, why would advertisers pay for amateur writer's creations, and why would professional writers sell ebooks with me? Well, for one thing, if you are selling through me, you don't have the publisher's cut and all the money is yours. You can very well sell it on Amazon et al., but here you can manage everything yourself with just a minuscule monthly fee. Setting up a store here would be dead simple.
I have been thinking about integrating it with twitter. For example, you just twit "Special discount. Check out http://foo.bar/2x813 and the customer gets either a lightbox popped up on twitter(if he is on a browser) or redirected to the browser if he is on some other client(if possible). There are some implementation issues, but it's mostly doable.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. I have other ideas. For one thing, I don't think shopify provides attachable shopping cart widgets, which is something very useful to you if you already have an online presence.
> find a differentiator you can use as a UVP.
And what is stopping shopify from implementing the same stuff? How will it matter then?
That's a very good question. If Shopify has a significantly larger presence than you in the market, and has the resources to copy any innovations you put in place, you're going to continually be in the position of trying to differentiate yourself. They've got the "first-mover advantage", and if you are going to survive (much less thrive), you're going to need something significant to offset it.
Which brings us back to the advice you got in the last go-round: you might want to find a niche (like e-book publishing) that you can focus on, where you can give a more specialized, more effective solution than Shopify's general purpose one. In other words, you give up the breadth of the market in order to make your offering more compelling to one particular segment. Shopify would have trouble following you down that path, as that would mean forking their codebase and attention.
In general, it's easier to compete in a market where nobody is, than a market where somebody already resides. By choosing to go into a space that is already dominated by someone means having to play the game on their terms-- you're always going to be having to define yourself in relation to them.
From what we have seen this far, looks like both of them are true for shopify.
> Which brings us back to the advice you got in the last go-round: you might want to find a niche (like e-book publishing) that you can focus on, where you can give a more specialized, more effective solution
That's a good advice. I have couple of things planned. The general idea is not to compete but project shopyist as being different from shopify.
> In general, it's easier to compete in a market where nobody is, than a market where somebody already resides.
That's a hard world to find. Even if you come up with something which doesn't already have existing players, there are bound to be big players at some point of time. Consider http://mightybrand.com. It's a good idea and hopefully a great implementation(haven't used it). There aren't any good SaaS players there but what is stopping Google from seeing it as lucrative and launching a competitor in a month? Google already have the index and sufficient competency in NLP to have it in a month.
I am not downplaying your advice, I am just saying that assuming we will have a market all to ourselves is a bit of wishful thinking. Though it certainly helps to get the required traction in the beginning which means a lot.
My point is that there is doubtless some niche of Shopify customers (or prospects) that are under-served by Shopify's offering, and that if you identify this niche, truly understand their needs, and make them deliriously happy, you can be set for life.
Often the way to get a market all to yourself is to re-invent an existing market. There were plenty of search engines before Google, but they changed the game, and AltaVista is now mostly forgotten.