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Comment by jerrre | Hacker News Reader

> Omvlee was very smart to target a large segment of the graphics sector’s largest, most powerful incumbent, as doing so created major tailwind for Sketch. Omvlee came to market with a differentiated product that was far better than even Adobe’s flagship product.

Great tip: just create something better than the household product for a large segment. Why did I never think of that....

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On a more positive note:

What I really like about the Sketch story (correct me if I'm wrong), is that a small product-first focused company can make a big enough dent in an existing market. Kind of refreshing between all these marketing/sales-first VC fast growing in employee size companies with a bad fluff/action ratio.

Is it an existing market? I got the impression a lot of their work and success has been around prototyping mobile applications. This is a niche nobody served and grew quite quickly.

I think you could say it was a niche in an existing broader market, which had previously been covered by Illustrator and Photoshop. Sketch came along with a focused tool which did it better than the general-purpose tools. But it's not like UI protoyping was impossible before Sketch came along.

I think the part you quote is very poorly written. But from the rest of the article seems like the specific ways in which Sketch was "better" was by being cheaper and simpler, and catering to a motivated subset of users (the Mac design market).

So classic Innovator's Dilemma stuff, really.

the problem ist the gap between your definition of "better" and your customers definition of "better".

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