
The right way to position against competition - paulsb
http://blog.asmartbear.com/competitive-positioning.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2Fsmartbear+%28A+Smart+Bear%3A+Startups+%2B+Marketing+%2B+Geekery%29
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DeusExMachina
Another reason why you have no competition: there is no market.

Sometimes we delude ourselves that we found a niche no one has addressed when
in fact there is no niche at all. This can be due to poor research, but as
stupid as it sounds, it happens. It happened to me, at least.

I spent a lot of time building a product on zone diet just believing that
because there were a lot of people following it and people buying products,
there existed also a market of people willing to plan their diet with a
computer program. It was my first software and I was very naive. But when I
released it I realized that it was not possible to reach this market: there
were no blogs about it and other marketing strategies were still unable to
reach a significant number of customers. People simply did not bother about a
"problem" that was just in my (and my friend's) mind. The customer where
unreachable because the market was non existent.

So, if you find yourself thinking that you have no competition, go back asking
the other question: is there a market for this?

~~~
reitzensteinm
Wow, that brings back painful memories. In high school I built a program
called the B3D Tweak Utility, an editor for the Blitz3D file format (a RAD
game tool). I sold maybe 30 or so copies for $20.

Encouraged that I could sell something online and see a return, I followed it
up a crazy GUI build tool with Python scripting that supported a ton of
extensions for eg building the demo and full versions of a product up to the
install file. Completely scratching my own itch, and it took a few months of
work.

I got zero sales. I posted on my usual dev forums with about two replies. The
only email I ever got about it was asking whether I was planning a Mac
version, which he'd absolutely need before he'd consider using it.

Thinking now about how much money I could make if I worked that hard on
something for 2 months today makes me ill... but I'm not sure there are any
short cuts around making those painful mistakes in the beginning. Experiencing
the bottom (i.e. investing time with 0 return) has made me laser focused on
market fit before I start any product today.

~~~
mkramlich
Similar experiences here in the past as well. Plus some painful learning
experiences with advertising. Had one product I spent several hundred dollars
on Google advertising. Product had zero sales. Then later I released a
different product. Spent zero on advertising -- just some self-promotion,
social media presence, tweets, and some free entries submitted on niche-
relevant sites --- and of course, it made hundreds of dollars in sales!
Totally counter-intuitive to my then-arguably-naive thinking. But useful
learning experience.

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Mc_Big_G
_A chart with one row for each "feature" and one column for each of six
"competitors." There's checks and X's everywhere, except of course a glowing,
highlighted column representing your company which just happens to be full of
checks. C'mon, everyone knows this is bullshit; it's insulting._

Ouch. That one hurts ==> <http://foreverlist.com/why#comparison_chart>

I always thought it was a decent way to showcase your strengths, not a way to
insult anyone. Obviously this comparison chart could include a row called
"traffic volume" in which they would all blow away Foreverlist, but why would
I showcase that?

Is this kind of comparison chart really that bad? What would you suggest?

~~~
Shooter
Using a feature comparison chart to try to explain your BENEFITS to a customer
is entirely different than using it in a presentation to a potential investor
to justify your market strategy.

That said, the ForeverList comparison chart is a bit overwhelming and could
use some sprucing up, design-wise. You might also be more effective if you
just drove your primary benefit home instead of listing so many different
features/points of distinction.

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eli
When I was briefly a tech journalist, "Tell me about your competition" was a
required question for any interview (even for dominant players in a market). I
was surprised by how many people seemed to stumble on it, but I guess they
were worried about how it would affect the narrative of what I was writing. I
always had a lot of respect for really honest, thoughtful answers.

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brlewis
This is good advice for how to think about the competitive landscape even if
you aren't pitching investors.

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Chris_Newton
> It's true that this industry hasn't yet seen a software

> solution, but that's not because they hate computers,

> but rather that it hasn't been possible to address

> that market with software. Now it is because (pick one):

A question to the author of the post: why the "pick one" qualifier?

Is it because any one of the reasons given should be sufficient?

Is it because more than one could be dangerous or at least counterproductive?

~~~
smartbear
Oh no reason, it could be more than one. Just a figure of speech, sort of like
a Cosmo quiz. :-)

Probably if you said "all of these" that's too good to be true, but surely 1-4
is normal if it's really the case.

~~~
Chris_Newton
Thanks. I was just worried for a moment, because two of those points describe
almost exactly the key advantages we see for a new venture! :-)

------
known
"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."
--Henry Ford

~~~
run4yourlives
Of course, faster horses and more importantly other car manufacturers were
Ford's competition. That's the whole point of the article.

Even as the bona fide leader, Ford was less than 1/3 of the entire industry.

