Ask HN: How can I compete in a well-established market? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I compete in a well-established market?

I am building an agile project management tool. As you all know, project management is a well-established market with giants like Jira and Trello. This is my first product, and I started it to create a comprehensive tool that startups can afford. However, my hope is dwindling day by day. The main thing is, I never want to give up, and I won't give up. I'm seeking your valuable insights.

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God what a crowded market. There aren't just all the established products but for some reason everybody and his brother and his sister and his uncle and his dog wants to make a project management tool.

I can't see how pricing is a problem for startups. I mean, you are paying somebody several thousand per month can't you afford $50 a month a seat to make them productive?

On top of that the low price comes right out of your pocket and makes you automatically less profitable.

I'd rather make a high priced product that can convince people to pay the price. There are very similar products used in areas other than software that are called "case management" it is a market I'd researched looking for applications of semantic technology. You might want to pivot to one of those markets. With software devs you are up against

https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-dont-use-software-that-cost...

An alternate idea is to make this the "anti-agile" project management tool to target the many people who think they hate agile... Maybe it is really agile but it tries to persuade people who hate agile that it really isn't.

My advice would be to either build it for a different niche (i.e., not software teams) or to go against the grain and target it to the agile rebels. If you do the latter, it still needs to be useful but you at least stand a chance. What if it just does kanban? Can it be a better kanban only project tool? Can it serve the construction industry only? What vector can you differentiate on? Think hard about that. Price ain't it.

How about writing a JIRA plug-in. You can find an area where it is lacking and write a plug-in for it.

Alternatively, start with an open source bug tracker. But offer to host it, and create improvements for it. It's been a long time, but you can set up something like bugzilla. (There's probably a more modern alternative out there).

Here's another idea. Start ups don't have a lot of money, consider receiving equity from the start up every month. Instead of a monthly rate, you receive shares every month. You will probably need a lawyer to set up this contract and there is probably a problem with this idea. I don't think you can receive ISOs, unless you are an employee, so they might have to hire you too, while they are using your bug tracking service.

OP can't compete on price so accepting equity is not a good incentive. He needs to compete on functionality that's differentiating and unfortunately, it's almost impossible to do so in this space

In commodity markets, you have to differentiate yourself based on other factors. Service, support, integrations, etc.

I'd look for non-obvious differentiators. Most of your competitors are cloud based. Would some customers want an on-prem solution for specific reasons (regulatory, data privacy, data sovereignty)? What about people who aren't sitting in front of computers all day? How are they managing projects? What about users with crappy net connections?

Commitment! It's one of the most human of values. It's what makes marriages last 50 years no matter what kind of significant problems come up.

> The main thing is, I never want to give up, and I won't give up.

Just focus on this. When things at the most bleak, remember that you're not allowed to quit, so work around that.

Perhaps you could choose some marketing gimmick? https://www.dogpile.com/serp?q=marketing+gimmicks+examples&s...

Brand yourself as "the first" or "the only" in a certain niche. I don't know anything about project management tools, so I cannot give you examples, but this is the method Dan Kennedy uses.

Focus on the niche market first and expand from there.

Wow, this is the thing I have been researching for a long time. Now I'm on the way to implement this!

In a crowded market, you need to understand what makes your product different and the best choice for the customers you're targeting.

Just "it's cheaper" isn't much of a place to start from.

Thank you for valuable insights.

Eh, be smart and give up when the time is right.

The target audience is startups? Wouldn't the majority of them fit into the free plan? (While potentially consuming most of the support time)

Valuable question! My target audience includes both startups and mid-sized companies. For some startups, the free plan will suffice. The primary reason for offering a free plan is to generate word-of-mouth marketing.

Be the best tool for projects that need _________.

Fill a niche in the market, provide excellent value.

Money.

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