

Ask HN: How did you market your app when there were already a lot like yours? - SingAlong

I've read about a lot of people developing services for a crowded market (or what some would call a saturated market) and still able to reach a  'ramen profitable' stage.<p>I do not want to point out specific startups, but recently read about Thymer, a project management app and Stunf's blog post on the launch here: http://stunf.com/blog/launch-the-week-after/<p>So to all those who have done it and are doing it, how did you guys do it?<p>P.S: Any links to articles dealing with topic?
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jd
Diederik from Stunf here.

Back when we started on Thymer we considered the market. In fact, we asked
ourselves: "do we want to enter a saturated market?". But then we realized
that we just _assumed_ the market was saturated, but we think the evidence
points to the contrary.

True, there are a lot of competitors. But surely the number of competitors
alone doesn't mean the market is saturated? The market isn't saturated until
you can choose between 4 or 5 products that are all great, and that all suit
your needs well. There may be hundreds of email services, but Gmail put them
all to shame. Sometimes taking just a slightly different approach can make all
the difference.

At this point only few of our competitors have great products, and even fewer
are truly successful. Or to put it another way: in another 5 years we expect
all the products to be radically different. The market hasn't matured yet
(like Word Processors have), which means the market leader of tomorrow
probably hasn't incorporated yet.

Or we can look at it from another perspective. Because task & project
management apps attract the GTD (Getting Things Done) crowd, people will
happily try out your product, blog about it, and so on. So in a way entering
an established market makes life easier for us. We don't have to explain what
we do, or what software as a service is -- people know what to expect. We just
emphasize what we're good at and we get people to give Thymer a test drive. If
they love Thymer they may buy it or recommend it to others.

So people know roughly what to expect when they hear of "another task and
project management app". From that point on we just have to exceed their every
expectation. That's of course easier said than done, but we don't expect it to
be easy.

Contrast this with marketing, say, a new search engine. People would ask: "Why
do I need this?" or "What's wrong with Google?". Even if your search engine
_is_ objectively better people will still compare what you do to what Google
does at every step. "Why don't you have a translate link?", and so on. Because
there are a good number of competing task and project management services the
comparison becomes much more nuanced. "So you have tags like Gmail, projects
like X, and teams like Y. That's nifty!". That makes our life pretty easy.
Imagine what marketing something entirely new would be like. I wouldn't know
where to start.

If you're interested we could write some more on our blog about this; explain
our point of view a little better.

------
jnovek
Well, we're a SaaS company that sells business-to-business so things are
probably different. One paying customer for us is probably like 10 or 100 for
you.

We entered what you might call a "saturated" market about 10 months ago. What
we did was:

1) We made our product much, much better than the competition, who were all
pretty stagnant.

2) We marketed our product directly. Like, calling potential customers on the
phone.

3) For each customer that we won, we rolled out the red carpet and tried to
give them everything we reasonable could.

4) We taught some of our customers to be evangelists.

Although we're just barely ramen profitable, we have piles of opportunities.
Our sales cycle can be anywhere from 2 to 6 months, and we have lots of
potential customers that we think are almost there.

~~~
alex_c
_4) We taught some of our customers to be evangelists._

This is obviously not an issue for all products, but how do you teach
customers to be evangelists if most other potential customers are their
competitors?

In fact, scrap that. Can you expand a little on how you accomplished this, in
general?

~~~
lloydarmbrust
I'm Jnovek's co-founder. We deal with businesses who are used to being
trampled on, so impressing them is really not that hard--but here's a quick
list of some of the things we've done:

1) We're honest and super-fast in responding to problems. This is huge, even
if you say, "whoa, we have no idea what's wrong but we're working on it" that
makes them feel like you care.

2) If anything does break, we're quick to give discounts. I firmly believe
that if our product doesn't perform as advertised then our customer shouldn't
have to pay for it.

3) I take any chance I can to "wow" them. For example, once an employee of one
of our clients had to do a bunch of extra work to make our product work on
their platform, while on the phone I had overheard her talking about how
excited she was to go see New Kids on the Block in concert and so we had a
NKTB shirt sent to her the next day. It cost us $50 but we have that client's
love forever.

4) We send letters. Real letters. (In the mail.) When you send someone a hand-
written note in the mail, they know you took the time to make that happen--
little things add up to big things.

5) We ask our clients for suggestions, and work with them to make the product
work better for them. It's very important that our client is making money with
our product--not just paying us for it.

6) I try to understand how their business works and uses our product. For
example, if I know they are usually busy on Wednesdays, I'll write that down
and call them on another day.

When you sit down with a client, talk about their problems, and try to build
products that solve those problems they get really excited--when you use their
ideas, they feel like they have ownership of your product.

How does this pay off? We have clients who go to events and speak to others in
their field about our product. And most of our clients are happy to receive
calls from others about our business.

Our self-appointed evangelist clients are probably worth more to our company
than the code we write.

------
lunaru
We operate in a market that has a few 800 pound gorillas with a bunch of 100
pound monkeys thrown in. I don't feel daunted for a second by the fact that
the market is crowded - it just proves that there are customers out there
looking for this particular kind of pain-killer.

The best-best is to have a unique workflow or feature and market it with a
simple message. Speak to the userbase that would appreciate your unique
position.

However, I think the most important thing to remember is that even if your
feature set is identical (or less), there are other points of differentiation,
even from a pure marketing point of view.

Here's an article that generalizes the problem from a perspective of a burger
joint: <http://www.yudkin.com/advantage.htm> (yeah, I know, that site is ugly)

Every burger joint sells the same basic product, but you probably have an
affinity for one over the others. Sometimes it's the flavor, but it can also
be the price, the environment, or the personality of the business that you
like.

Try to be unique, memorable, or remarkable in some way. Study your market,-
plot it out if you have to - and find where you belong in the spectrum.

------
edw519
"Differentiate or Die"

Google this phrase or buy the book:

[http://www.amazon.com/Differentiate-Die-Survival-Killer-
Comp...](http://www.amazon.com/Differentiate-Die-Survival-Killer-
Competition/dp/0471028924)

My favorite passage:

"The best way to really enter minds that hate complexity and confusion is to
oversimplify your message. The lesson here is not to try to tell your entire
story. Just focus on one powerful differentiating idea and drive it into the
mind. That sudden hunch, that creative leap of the mind that "sees" in a flash
how to solve a problem in a simple way, is something quite different from
general intelligence. If there's any trick to finding that simple set of
words, it's one of being ruthless about how you edit the story you want to
tell. Anything that others could claim just as well as you can, eliminate.
Anything that requires a complex analysis to prove, forget. Anything that
doesn't fit with your customers' perceptions, avoid."

with particular emphasis on:

 _Just focus on one powerful differentiating idea and drive it into the mind._

Why should anyone choose you?

~~~
DanHulton
This is exactly what I'm doing with Bill On Site, an invoicing application I
launched earlier this week. The online invoicing market has many big players
in it with excellent applications (Ballpark, Freshbooks, Curdbee, Ronin, just
to name a few), but of all of them, only Freshbooks caters to the mobile
market, and they only support iPhones.

It's early days yet, but we're getting some good reviews from sites that have
tried our app out with various mobile phones and found it fast and intuitive.

From here we scale up traffic and drive conversions, and oh, BUST YOUR ASS FOR
YOUR CUSTOMERS.

Differentiation is good and all, but the #1 thing I've read that helped grow a
business is being there for your customers when they need you most. Answer
emails ASAP, fix your product ASAP, offer discounts, extended trial time,
everything you can to make your customers super-happy.

------
vaksel
Step #1: Charge money($4.99-$9.99 a month)

Step #2: Get covered in blogs and get 100,000 visitors.

Step #3: Get 1% signups(1000 paying customers), get paid your subscription
fees. Bam you are making $5K-$10K/yr

It's basically the "there are a billion people in china, if 1% buys our
product...we'll be rich!"

~~~
latortuga
Reminds me of <http://sivers.org/1pct>

~~~
vaksel
hey it works, as long as you can get enough traffic to your site, a certain
percentage will buy it. Then you scale it till you are profitable.

~~~
mrduncan
Right, but keep in mind that (as Derek Sivers put it so well) 1% isn't the
smallest percentage that you can get. Zero is also a percentage.

