I'm building a SaaS for just one person

Yeah, passive consumption is the issue. TV, videogames, etc.

> If you're launching a new product, how do you compete with products that have loads of features?

One way to compete with incumbents, in the beginning, is by niching down, and offering things they can't.

Using your tax software example, it'd make sense to start with a single persona first (e.g. Tax Software for US-based freelancers). By building a tool for the specific audience, you can offer an experience a generic tool can't (i.e. a sole proprietor doesn't care much about corporate income taxes, excise taxes, etc.). You will also have less competition if you decide to go down the paid acquisition route.

FWIW, I have noticed that some subset of my customers only use a particular set of features, and don't care much about the rest.

Another advantage of focusing on a niche is that people with similar characteristics tend to congregate in a handful of communities, which makes it relatively easier to reach them. At some point, you can hopefully take advantage of word of mouth, and that is an incredibly powerful way of acquiring new customers.

Also, when you're the person who built the service, you can offer support to customers in a way your established competitors simply can't. Caring about things is a competitive advantage.

Make no mistake about it: it's going to be incredibly hard. However, by going after the existing market, you minimize chances of market mistake, which is costlier than a product mistake (i.e. you increase your odds of survival).

P.S. Having an existing audience makes things easier. People buy from people they know, trust, and like, even if your offering isn't the best out there.

If you are launching a new product you can't compete against entrenched competition in breadth of features. You need to compete against them by finding a small niche use case or feature and becoming the best piece of software for that niche. Using your tax software example, you would want to become the best tax software ever for pet store owners (random example), then you capture 100% of the pet store market and move out from there.

Few successful business start out with loads of features. They start out with the most important subset of features they need to get enough clients in the beginning to survive. Then come the enterprise contracts strong arming them into developing niche features that almost no one else needs, growth targets that requiring catering to lots of individual users who each need their own niche feature X and Y to sell it to their boss, and competitors that require them to differentiate just to stay shiny in customers' eyes. The general advice for startups is to find a niche. Even if they're VC funded, they're supposed to find a niche at first because thats a way of delaying all that expensive development they will have to do to catch up with competitors until they can afford it.

The key is that feature development productivity is inverse to company size and revenue. The bigger they are, the more customers they have, and the more money they make, the more time and effort they have to spend just keeping everyone aware of changes, let alone actually deciding how to move forward and executing. This is the complete opposite of almost every other industry where economies of scale dominate so unless your niche has extreme network effects like Google's Search business or Facebook's social network, there will always be room for more competition.

By doing the one feature people care about well. Don't look at huge products, look at really small niche ones.

e.g., there are lots of small businesses that need to write up bids for work and email the resulting quote as a pdf. That's it!

A lot of the competition is stuff like Salesforce or JobBoss or other ERP tools that are gross overkill for the 20-person welding shop, not to mention way outside their budget.

Or, as I found out from browsing commercial lawn care forums, people want scheduling apps that can take before and after pictures of lawns to email to the homeowner. There's another fairly small project that's useful and saleable.

You'll find that if you go down this path, the biggest challenge is going to be marketing and customer acquisition, not building the product. I'm always tempted to build small apps like this, but I keep going back to embedded work because it's more fun!

So one approach I have used is to launch a very opinionated product. Don't try to be everything to everyone - this is where all those features come from. Focus on what you feel is the best workflow and promote it unappologetically. This works really well if you are also a current (or emerging) expert in the field because it's viable for a single builder to codify their best practices. You marketing should then highlight both your skill as the thought leader and your product as the easiest, most effective way to put what you're promoting into practice.

This won't necessarily work in a domain like tax software where the feature requirements are well understood, but does work in areas that have a step learning curve because it helps people adopt them.

If you sleep 8 hours and consume 90 minutes showering, relieving yourself, eating that leaves you with 101.5 hours per week.

If you had to you could probably spend all this time running your mouth but probably not intellectual work.

This assumes that you have no responsibilities of any kind and everything is done for you.

Agreed that 90+ or 120 are just insanely difficult to do on the regular. I think I could have 1 such week per month, maybe once per quarter. One thing that might be a bit different in your example is if all 90 hours were for the same product. It might have been tougher for you to pay some time context switching between the two. Whereas, Elon Musk is doing all his hours for the same task. (Well, actually he's a terrible example because he probably has 100 tasks he does for 1 hour each week, but you get my point for the general case.)

How much do you plan to spend on customer acquisition? Often with small SaaSes, this is overlooked or grossly underestimated. The problem is building it and almost nobody showing up.