

Follow-up of HN's response to my post - irahul
http://blog.shopyist.com/let-the-madness-continue

======
michael_dorfman
A lot of the bullet points in the list reduce, in my mind, to one question:
what's the business case for a customer to choose Shopyist over Shopify? You
need a good answer to this question, and so far, I don't see the Unique Value
Proposition.

Some people are suggesting you do Market Research to find this, others are
suggesting that you find a narrow niche to begin with and customize to fit
their needs, others are suggesting you outline the features. But at the end of
the day, they all reduce to the same thing: find a differentiator you can use
as a UVP.

~~~
irahul
> what's the business case for a customer to choose Shopyist over Shopify? I
> have been thinking a lot about them. I have ideas about people selling
> digital goods viz. writers selling ebooks. I have been thinking about the
> piracy concerns and ways to mitigate them. It won't be upto me but upto the
> writers/musicians to embrace the new media and make up for the piracy with
> advertisement in the ebooks, like there are advertisements in actual
> magazines.

But then this begs the question, why would advertisers pay for amateur
writer's creations, and why would professional writers sell ebooks with me?
Well, for one thing, if you are selling through me, you don't have the
publisher's cut and all the money is yours. You can very well sell it on
Amazon et al., but here you can manage everything yourself with just a
minuscule monthly fee. Setting up a store here would be dead simple.

I have been thinking about integrating it with twitter. For example, you just
twit "Special discount. Check out <http://foo.bar/2x813> and the customer gets
either a lightbox popped up on twitter(if he is on a browser) or redirected to
the browser if he is on some other client(if possible). There are some
implementation issues, but it's mostly doable.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I have other ideas. For one thing, I
don't think shopify provides attachable shopping cart widgets, which is
something very useful to you if you already have an online presence.

> find a differentiator you can use as a UVP.

And what is stopping shopify from implementing the same stuff? How will it
matter then?

~~~
michael_dorfman
_And what is stopping shopify from implementing the same stuff? How will it
matter then?_

That's a very good question. If Shopify has a significantly larger presence
than you in the market, and has the resources to copy any innovations you put
in place, you're going to continually be in the position of trying to
differentiate yourself. They've got the "first-mover advantage", and if you
are going to survive (much less thrive), you're going to need something
significant to offset it.

Which brings us back to the advice you got in the last go-round: you might
want to find a niche (like e-book publishing) that you can focus on, where you
can give a more specialized, more effective solution than Shopify's general
purpose one. In other words, you give up the breadth of the market in order to
make your offering more compelling to one particular segment. Shopify would
have trouble following you down that path, as that would mean forking their
codebase and attention.

In general, it's easier to compete in a market where nobody is, than a market
where somebody already resides. By choosing to go into a space that is already
dominated by someone means having to play the game on their terms-- you're
always going to be having to define yourself in relation to them.

~~~
irahul
> If Shopify has a significantly larger presence than you in the market, and
> has the resources to copy any innovations you put in place

From what we have seen this far, looks like both of them are true for shopify.

> Which brings us back to the advice you got in the last go-round: you might
> want to find a niche (like e-book publishing) that you can focus on, where
> you can give a more specialized, more effective solution

That's a good advice. I have couple of things planned. The general idea is not
to compete but project shopyist as being different from shopify.

> In general, it's easier to compete in a market where nobody is, than a
> market where somebody already resides.

That's a hard world to find. Even if you come up with something which doesn't
already have existing players, there are bound to be big players at some point
of time. Consider <http://mightybrand.com>. It's a good idea and hopefully a
great implementation(haven't used it). There aren't any good SaaS players
there but what is stopping Google from seeing it as lucrative and launching a
competitor in a month? Google already have the index and sufficient competency
in NLP to have it in a month.

I am not downplaying your advice, I am just saying that assuming we will have
a market all to ourselves is a bit of wishful thinking. Though it certainly
helps to get the required traction in the beginning which means a lot.

~~~
michael_dorfman
It's not at all that hard to find a market to yourself, if you think small
enough-- and 'small enough' can still be plenty big. The first company I
started was aimed at large networks of salmon farmers; worldwide, there were
only about 20 customers worth considering, and there were already two software
vendors serving the market (but not offering products similar to what we
created.) From that base, we got enough traction to compete head-to-head with
the existing products, and expand into other markets (chicken, pigs, dairy
farmers, etc.) and the company had about 30 employees when I cashed out.

My point is that there is doubtless some niche of Shopify customers (or
prospects) that are under-served by Shopify's offering, and that if you
identify this niche, truly understand their needs, and make them deliriously
happy, you can be set for life.

Often the way to get a market all to yourself is to re-invent an existing
market. There were plenty of search engines before Google, but they changed
the game, and AltaVista is now mostly forgotten.

------
sajid
It's a big market and there are no network effects in play. There's plenty of
room for more than one player.

