
How to Break into a Crowded Market and Win - tanyaprive1485
https://tanyaprive.com/how-to-break-into-a-crowded-market-and-win/
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hbcondo714
It's interesting to contrast Vivino's strategy of breaking into crowded
markets by doing "a competitive landscape analysis" versus Inkdrop's advise of
getting their first 500 paid users by "Ignoring All Competitors" as discussed
in a previous HN post here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18216783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18216783)

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arkitaip
We really have no idea what makes a business successful in such a way that we
can turn that knowledge into a repeatable process.

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diminoten
> Quickly Zachariassen learned that Vivino didn’t have to be the best wine
> app. It just had to be better than his competitors.

Okay cool, words mean things, and doesn't "best" mean "better than the rest"?
I just feel like the article is full of phrases like this that rub off as
motivational speaker styling, and that makes me inherently skeptical.

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echelon
I have the problem of primarily being interested in a few already crowded
markets with gargantuan incumbents. I dream about starting in an adjacent,
undiscovered niche, growing to scale, then nimbly pushing my way back in and
catching them off guard.

The problem is that I love the space they operate in, but I feel they're
delivering mostly generic tripe. I can't just go work for them. I don't have
the clout to become a leader in their orgs, and I wouldn't be happy at the
bottom.

I'm talking about Netflix and Disney.

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throwaway2016a
That is one of the recommendations of the book Crossing the Chasm

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gumby
Google is a classic example. Although all my friends were using Google when it
was hosted at Stanford, when they got some money I still wondered, "but who
thinks the world needs another search engine?"

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threeseed
I remember exactly when Google was released.

The reason it became popular was pretty simple. It was fast, clean, single
purpose and had no advertising. It was the complete opposite of Altavista and
Yahoo at the time. And as we've seen countless times there is always room in a
market for simple, focused products.

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mwerty
Also - the results were atleast an order of magnitude more relevant.

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gumby
As a VC friend put it to me a few years ago: "I only get to invest in fools.
Either they go into a crowded market where they will be crushed by the
incumbent before getting airborne or they will go into a new market where they
will run out of cash before getting airborne."

(if you're offended by his use of "fools" don't be -- he was being sarcastic:
people can always find a reason to say "no").

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lacampbell
In a way, aren't crowded markets lower risk? You already have a lot of
validation that it's a thing people will pay for, and you have a lot of
examples to show you how (and how not to!) do things.

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human20190310
> Zachariassen... noticed that the top players on the market failed to tell
> him one basic thing: should he buy this wine?

Good article. I long for a return to this kind of old-school capitalism, where
people study the competition instead of fearing it, and try to get their money
by being better.

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democracy
But why vivino was better than competition? I mean we get the score and read
reviews - but what else do they have??? Sorry I didn't check the mobile app
but even last month I had to carefully craft my wine names to find them on the
website

