The right way to position against competition | Hacker News Reader

The right way to position against competition

blog.asmartbear.com

108 pointspaulsb14 comments

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?

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.

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.

So very true.

A gap in the market != a market in the gap.

A chart with one row for each "feature" and one column for each of six "competitors." There's checks and X's everywhere, except of course a glowing, highlighted column representing your company which just happens to be full of checks. C'mon, everyone knows this is bullshit; it's insulting.

Ouch. That one hurts ==> http://foreverlist.com/why#comparison_chart

I always thought it was a decent way to showcase your strengths, not a way to insult anyone. Obviously this comparison chart could include a row called "traffic volume" in which they would all blow away Foreverlist, but why would I showcase that?

Is this kind of comparison chart really that bad? What would you suggest?

Using a feature comparison chart to try to explain your BENEFITS to a customer is entirely different than using it in a presentation to a potential investor to justify your market strategy.

That said, the ForeverList comparison chart is a bit overwhelming and could use some sprucing up, design-wise. You might also be more effective if you just drove your primary benefit home instead of listing so many different features/points of distinction.

It can be that bad. Such a chart can be gamed (like any table or chart). It can also be a crutch. Do you need the chart to show your differentiation versus the competition? If the perspective customer would otherwise not know how you're different, then you may be better off investing your time work on the message.

When I was briefly a tech journalist, "Tell me about your competition" was a required question for any interview (even for dominant players in a market). I was surprised by how many people seemed to stumble on it, but I guess they were worried about how it would affect the narrative of what I was writing. I always had a lot of respect for really honest, thoughtful answers.

This is good advice for how to think about the competitive landscape even if you aren't pitching investors.

> It's true that this industry hasn't yet seen a software

> solution, but that's not because they hate computers,

> but rather that it hasn't been possible to address

> that market with software. Now it is because (pick one):

A question to the author of the post: why the "pick one" qualifier?

Is it because any one of the reasons given should be sufficient?

Is it because more than one could be dangerous or at least counterproductive?

Oh no reason, it could be more than one. Just a figure of speech, sort of like a Cosmo quiz. :-)

Probably if you said "all of these" that's too good to be true, but surely 1-4 is normal if it's really the case.

Thanks. I was just worried for a moment, because two of those points describe almost exactly the key advantages we see for a new venture! :-)

"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." --Henry Ford

Of course, faster horses and more importantly other car manufacturers were Ford's competition. That's the whole point of the article.

Even as the bona fide leader, Ford was less than 1/3 of the entire industry.

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