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Comment by cooperadymas | Hacker News Reader

99.999% of their potential customer base is still using Google Analytics. I'm not sure the comparison to anything else matters at this point.

When you buy a Tesla you won't find comparisons about potential savings or benefits over other electric cars. Instead it is compared to the cost of ownership of a gas powered car.

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I'm not sure. If you are convinced you need privacy-first analytics, and thus need to get off Google Analytics (e.g. because you've heard about Plausible) wouldn't you at least do a quick google to find other products (which might be better/cheaper - not saying they are, but you'd at least look?) And then you'd need reasons to choose one over the other.

And, when they started up, they must have googled and found other products and decide to start up anyway? I'd love to know more about that decision. Seems like it'd be difficult to justify, but obviously it worked out for them so maybe I'm just overthinking it.

Having lots of competition doesn't mean they have equal market share. It doesn't matter than there are lots of competitors if all of them are fighting for less than 1% of the market share. In fact, you don't even need to worry about them since none of them have figured out how to wrestle market share away from Google.

As for competition, you want to enter a market with competition. If there is no competition, then there must be a reason. Either a) there is no market at all, b) the market is not profitable or c) you are inventing a new market. I have seen many founders try to do c) because of your reasoning of finding something with no competition and fail.

Competition also shows you might have timing correct. If they had no competition except Google, then why would Plausible be the only ones to see the market opportunity? That's extremely unlikely and would indicate to me that Google still had a stronghold on the market.

I second this, it's better to enter a market with some competition and turnover, if you are trying to invent a new market, even if yhe need is real, you need to explain to people why they need this new wiered thing they never considered. unless you have tremendously deep pockets, you probably can't afford customer education at scale.

also you dont have any data to enable you to separate potential customers fron people who just want to waste your time because they are curious but wont buy. you dony know the buy cycle in that markrt, etc.

> And then you'd need reasons to choose one over the other.

Seeing which service has customers you have heard of as a proxy for credibility.

thanks for sharing! there's this saying in marketing that you should ignore anyone who's not much bigger than you so that's how we think about it. we focus on the tools with a large audience and ignore the rest as few people in our target audience would have heard about them. people tell us all the time how they didn't even know alternatives to GA existed before they found us and that tells a lot about the state of the market for millions of sites that use GA

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