I've been panicking the last couple of hours, but now it's back to the grind. I've got a lot more feature ideas in mind, and this is just that extra push to do the things I've been putting off.
If you can't position, then you become a commodity and you're competing purely on price.
Furthermore, one way to avoid ending up in a feature for feature fight to the death with a bigger player is to think instead in terms of “job to be done”: https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done
By planning what you work on by focusing on what the customer is trying to achieve you’ll do yourself a favour when it comes to marketing as you’ll be able to speak in terms they understand.
Lastly, as you’ll see in the positioning book above, it’s not wise to completely avoid competitor analysis despite how unpleasant and draining it can sometimes be. A potential customer needs to understand why they would choose you over the incumbent. You need to know that answer before they can.
You can make a moat around your product, but that is different. You still have a core value proposition that solves their real world problem and there will be other people solving it too.
Most companies build moats through contractual lock in, trust and size, or simply buying their competitors. I have yet to see a feature only moat.
Features that induce a significant network effect can potentially lead to a moat. No contracts necessary.
(Maybe this is what you meant when you mentioned "size" as a moat-building mechanism.)
This is a feature that no other company could have built. Every single one of Supreme's competitors could have known that Supreme would be releasing the brick and the information would be utterly useless to them because only Supreme could have released the Supreme brick.
On the one end you have Supreme and the other you have pure commodities and It's up to you to figure out where you'd like to be along that spectrum.
www.investopedia.com/terms/c/commodity.asp
For example, take a Toyota Prius. Most people would not think of that as a commodity. It also is not a monopoly. If Toyota Prius where a software tech startup, they would be bemoaning the fact that they have become a "commodity" (read: it's become a competitive market where consumers have choice between differentiated goods).
Over a long enough timeframe, the better player always wins.
Sometimes, a competitor isn't playing the same game.
I’ve just spent a few days with a client who is in a bit of a fluster, as they feel their business (ten years, eight people, very healthy revenue & profit with huge blue-chip clients) is under threat from a new VC backed competitor.
I said to think of it differently - that the new competitor is so inefficient and unsure about what they are doing that they need a $100M safety blanket. Some will be dazzled by their meteoritic trail - and will get their fingers burned when they touch it.
Also, that with a small team and minimal funding you have secured robust relationships with the core clients they need to make their business a success, and have locked them out. With a small team and minimal funding, you are the guys being invited to speak at conferences - and they are having to sponsor them to get air-time.
Finally, almost verbatim, as I give this speech to both myself and others fairly frequently: “Keep your eyes in the boat, row your own race - and make them anticipate and fear your moves. The moment you worry about what is happening in their boat and how you should respond, you are rowing their race, and you have lost.”
Either way, they went away bubbly and excited about the prospect of grinding their cocksure new competitor into sparkly dust!
Take the Overcast podcast app, for example. I was one of the first users of it. The way its evolved over the years is directly because the founder uses it routinely. He didn't start by including the less obvious features right off the bat, he started by building the obvious ones. Only after he was happy with it did he start to pull in other features from other apps.
Some products you just can't do this with. I get it. I truly do, but try your best to find some sub-problem and ship it. Even if it's only to yourself.
I happened to befriend a number of successful startup founders ten years ago, before they'd made it. All the people I've seen sell companies had grit, myself included, but only the ones that shipped fast sold them for more than $Xm, myself not included.
SHIP.
(If you need more advice, better tailored to your product feel free to email me, but the most important advice will always be to ship.)
You have to study the entire market (which means competitors), and then see how you fit in there, and what is special.