

ASK NH: For a startup, how many competitors is too many? - ohnine

For my B2C startup idea, which I will only be able to launch in about 6 months with an MVP, I have about 10-11 direct competitors right now, one of them has even been bought by Facebook already. I don&#x27;t exactly want to make it huge and sell to Facebook for millions of dollars, I just want a lifestyle business.<p>I believe that my startup will be better in some ways than some of them, e.g. I will definitely have a better backend algorithm, since I design Machine Learning algorithms for a living, and I will have about three features, which these startups have individually, but none of them have all of them on one platform (I am not even sure if this is an advantage, but I like minimalism, so I will try not to make it too clustered and will be introducing them one after the other, not at once, and they are all related to each other).<p>On the other hand, I am not the best designer, so until I start having a revenue, the design will not be as nice as some of these VC backed startups, and of course, I won&#x27;t have as much press as them, so I will have to do my own marketing and advertising.<p>I know that having competitors is not always a disadvantage, but this is scary for a few reasons, 1.) I didn&#x27;t know Facebook had bought one of these startups, so I am sure they have plans to enter this area 2.) 10-11 competitors seems a bit too many 3.) I really love this idea, and I just want to keep on building it, but I am scared that it is going to fail due to these reasons, so I am finding it vey hard to be motivated right now, I am still at a phase where I could just quit this, before I put too much work into it for no reason and venture on to a new idea.<p>So, what do you think? Am I doomed to fail?
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chrisbridgett
> 1.) I didn't know Facebook had bought one of these startups, so I am sure
> they have plans to enter this area

There are lots of reasons companies acquire other companies. More often than
not it's for it's employee's and talent (then again, we don't know which
market this is, so they may be considering entering the space, who knows?).

Number 2 depends on market size/saturation. How many CRM companies do you
think there are out there? Thousands.

And finally number 3 - build your _minimum viable product_ , get it out there,
get feedback, test the waters. That's the only way you'll know for sure and
you obviously believe in your idea, so I say go for it!

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dragonbonheur
11 competitors give you a little more than a search engine results page for
the search terms you're all interested in, so don't panic yet - it's not like
you had hundreds of competitors. Of course you should allow yourself he
freedom to pivot at any time during your startup phase. Being scared is a good
thing: only the paranoid survive.

