Comments on: Should you choose a competitive market or an untapped one?

By: Saturn Social

Saturn Social — Sun, 06 Nov 2016 01:18:01 +0000

Who is your specific audience? From your home page I cannot tell…the most specific you are is “teams”…not very specific? Entrepreneurs, SaaS…people attracted to your story?

By: Marius

Marius — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 20:08:37 +0000

The longer the market existed, the bigger those Goliaths are though.

Extreme example: Slack or Dropbox vs. Microsoft Office 365.
A business owner will clearly go for Microsoft Office 365, which at the same price or smaller than competition, provides all those features and more.
If I’d want to build a Slack competitor, now I’d have to build an entire office suite and more, or just price the Slack functionality at $1 instead of $6.

Any advice on how to tackle big, big Goliaths?
Thanks!

By: Benjamin Carlson

Benjamin Carlson — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 19:25:31 +0000

At what point do you give up, and shutdown a service / product / feature so you can concentrate on making a new or existing service / product / feature better? How do you communicate this to your customers?

Thanks Alex!

By: Daniel Lang

Daniel Lang — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 17:48:57 +0000

Thanks for sharing this Alex. I agree with you that deliberately choosing an already-competitive market has a lot of advantages that first time entrepreneurs often overlook, because instinctively, they feel that if someone else has already done it, it’s not worth doing anymore. Whereas just like you pointed out, the exact opposite is true because it usually means it’s a problem worth solving, plus there are existing channels for distribution that a new entrant can tap into.

However, I think it should be added that this logic assumes that the entrepreneur’s goal is to carve out a profitable niche and grow a moderately fast growing, healthy business into that. This is not necessarily true for everyone, maybe not even for most people starting a venture. A lot of great companies have defined new categories and went after hyper-growth, go-big-or-go-home opportunities. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. If you’re in your early 20s, no family or mortgage and have access to funding, by all means, please go for it and aim high. The risk to fail is incredibly high, but you also have little to lose and VC money wants to be spent on these moonshots anyways.

Meanwhile, us “older” people would rather choose a 30% chance to build $30M business instead of 0.3% to build a $3B business. Your advice is great for us.

By: Bryan Lewis

Bryan Lewis — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 16:40:43 +0000

I agree with your overall point but I’m not sure the title is accurate. Maybe it’s a different conversation, but with the caveat “for our specific audience” aren’t you are essentially saying “for our specific market”, or “for our specific niche”?

By: CauseSquare

CauseSquare — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 16:19:25 +0000

Totaly agree. It doesn’t matter which one you pick. Just make sure you love what you’re doing because the road will be long and lonely.

By: Roger Lightfoot

Roger Lightfoot — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 16:14:08 +0000

$100k first and now you are about to smash $500k – I imagine you are wondering where to pitch the next milestone?! Fantastic results.

By: Pablo Fernandez

Pablo Fernandez — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 15:37:55 +0000

Thanks for sharing that, Alex. In light of this post, do you disagree with the ideas behind Blue/Red Ocean strategies or do you consider that what you are saying isn’t incompatible with a blue ocean strategy?

Thanks!